Boating Couple (said to be Aline Charigot and Renoir)

Renoir kept this pastel for ten years. He made it around 1881, a young woman in a flowered hat holding a bunch of violets, next to a man in a straw boater and a striped shirt who has his back to us, and he sold it to his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel only on 25 August 1891. By tradition the pair are Aline Charigot, the seamstress who later became his wife, and Renoir himself, and the museum's title keeps the hedge, said to be. With the man's face turned away, the picture cannot settle it. In November 1924, three weeks after Alvan T. Fuller was elected governor of Massachusetts, the Boston car dealer bought it from Durand-Ruel in Paris. Fuller died in 1958, and in 1961 his foundation gave the pastel to the Museum of Fine Arts in his memory.