Bathers in a Clearing

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston was founded in 1870 and opened its first building, on Copley Square, on 4 July 1876, the hundredth anniversary of American independence. By then this canvas already belonged to it. James Davis of Boston gave it in January of that year, half a year before the doors opened. It had travelled fast. Corot died in February 1875, the paintings left in his studio were auctioned in Paris that May, and within eight months this one was in Boston. A stamp on the back names Alexis-Eugène Détrimont, who worked in Paris as a dealer, restorer and framer, though the museum does not know what part he played in the sale. It dates the picture to Corot's last years, about 1870 to 1875. Pale birches and a big dark trunk frame a grey sky, a pond opens in the middle distance, and among the bushes at the lower left a few bathers sit or stand at the water's edge.