Bridge in the Mountains

Before it reached Boston, this landscape belonged to Hayashi Tadamasa, a Japanese dealer who made his career in Paris. He had come to France as an interpreter for the World's Fair of 1878, stayed, and sold Japanese prints and objects to a city in love with them, while buying the work of the painters he got to know.

Guillaumin painted the bridge in 1889. The museum's record names no river and no place, only a bridge among mountains.

Hayashi went home to Japan in 1905 meaning to open a museum of Western art there, and died the next year before he could. His collection was sold at auction in New York in January 1913, and this canvas was lot 152. By 1915 it was with Durand-Ruel, the Paris and New York dealers, who lent it that November to an exhibition of French Impressionists in Detroit. The Boston collector John Taylor Spaulding bought it from them in 1921 and left it to the museum in 1948.