Beaulieu: The Bay of Fourmis

In March 1892 Boudin was working on the Riviera at Beaulieu, between Nice and Monaco, and he wrote the place and the month beside his signature in the lower left corner of this canvas. That same spring it hung at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, one of three seaside views he showed there. In May the dealer Durand-Ruel bought it straight from him, and by the end of the year it was with the firm's New York branch. Its best-known American owner was Richard Canfield, who ran fashionable gambling houses in New York and Saratoga Springs and collected paintings on the side. At the sale of his estate in 1916 it went for 5,000 dollars to Jacob Ruppert, the New York brewer who co-owned the Yankees and in 1920 bought Babe Ruth from the Boston Red Sox. Ruppert left the painting to the Metropolitan Museum when he died in 1939.