At the Fountain

Puvis de Chavannes made his name on the walls of a provincial museum. The new museum in Amiens, in northern France, took his first large murals in the early 1860s, and by 1865 his allegories of peace, war, work and rest ran along its walls and up its main staircase. A mural stays where it is fixed, so throughout his career he repainted parts of his big decorations as smaller pictures that collectors could buy. The Museum of Fine Arts describes this one, painted around 1869, as a reduction based on a mural at Amiens. Smaller is relative here. The canvas is about 1.8 metres tall, two half-draped women at a spring in a wood, water running from a spout into a jar, a horseman passing far behind them.

The picture crossed the Atlantic early. The dealer Durand-Ruel had it in New York by 1894, and the next year the Boston collector Susan Cornelia Warren bought it and lent it at once to the Museum of Fine Arts for an exhibition of his work. In 1903 it was sold at the auction of her collection in New York to Robert Dawson Evans and his wife, Maria Antoinette, and it entered the museum with her bequest in 1917.