Family Group

In 1867 Thomas Couture put his teaching into a book, Méthode et entretiens d'atelier, method and studio talks. Much of it is about the ébauche, the first laying-in of a picture, and he gave his readers practical recipes for getting a tone right in a single pass instead of building it up slowly.

This small canvas, which the museum dates to 1866, is an oil sketch of that kind, about 40 centimetres high. It shows a family out of doors, a man standing over two seated women and a small child.

It may have reached Boston within a year. In 1867 the Boston writer and collector Thomas Gold Appleton lent a sketch by Couture to an exhibition at the Allston Club, a society of local artists, and the museum thinks it may have been this one. Appleton was the wit credited with saying that good Americans, when they die, go to Paris. The canvas passed to his half-brother Nathan Appleton, who sold it to the museum in 1899 for 300 dollars.