Cattle on the Dunes

Jules Dupré is mostly remembered for woods and river meadows north of Paris, yet from 1865 he spent his summers at Cayeux-sur-Mer, a fishing town on the Picardy coast near the mouth of the Somme, where he bought a house. The coast took over much of his work, and the catalogue of his paintings lists more than 150 sea pieces made between 1860 and 1880.

This canvas belongs to that coastal world. Cattle graze along a ridge of dunes, with the sea beyond and a wide sky over both. The museum gives it no date. Dupré signed it at the lower left.

It came from the collection of Susan Cornelia Warren of Boston, wife of the paper manufacturer Samuel Dennis Warren and mother of Edward Perry Warren, the collector who supplied the museum with many of its Greek and Roman antiquities. Her pictures were auctioned in New York in January 1903, and this canvas was bought at that sale for the museum.