Banks of the Sèvre (Vendée)

In 1837 Théodore Rousseau, then 25, travelled west with his friend and fellow painter Charles Le Roux to the Le Roux house at Souliers, near Bressuire, in the hedged farm country where the royalist uprising of the Vendée had been fought in the 1790s. That stay gave him one of his best-known canvases, the Avenue of Chestnut Trees now in the Louvre. The title of this panel points to the same corner of France, the banks of the Sèvre in the Vendée, yet it belongs to a much later moment. The museum dates it 1859, and at the lower left Rousseau wrote Paris and a year of which only 185 can still be read. His signature is at the lower right. The picture's early history in Boston is uncertain. It may have belonged by 1879 to Thomas Wigglesworth, who perhaps lent it that year to the Boston Art Club, and it came down in his family to his niece, Jane Norton Grew, who gave it to the museum in 1917.