Boulevard Saint-Denis, Argenteuil, in Winter

The date beside Monet's signature on this snow scene reads 90. He painted it in 1875 in Argenteuil, the river town just outside Paris where he was living, so the signature went on 15 years later, in the year the picture was sold to Boston. The Museum of Fine Arts calls attention to the exact moment it records, the sun trying to break through a light fall of snow, with a few figures under umbrellas making their way along the boulevard. That moment was planned more carefully than it looks. Monet made a preparatory sketch for the composition first, and the museum sees deliberate thought behind the handling that seems so spontaneous. By 1888 the canvas belonged to a Paris collector, Henri Kapferer, who sold it that July to Paul Durand-Ruel, Monet's dealer. In September 1890 it was bought for Peter Chardon Brooks of Boston, and it stayed in his family for the next 88 years. His daughter, Eleanor Saltonstall, first lent it to the museum in 1920, and her son Richard gave it in 1978.