An evening. Boatman moored

The scene is a quiet one. A boatman sits in his moored boat among the reeds, a cow stands in the shallows, and a mass of dark trees leans out over the water against a pale evening sky. It is dated only to the third quarter of the 19th century. Its later history was less calm. In 1974 the canvas was placed on deposit in the town museum of Semur-en-Auxois in Burgundy, and on the night of 17 to 18 October 1984 it was one of five paintings by Corot stolen from there. The pictures turned up in Japan, and four of the five eventually came back to France. This one was handed back to the Louvre on 4 April 1989, and the Louvre's record credits the Murauchi Museum at Hachioji, near Tokyo, with a decisive part in its return.