Farm by a River

Sarah Wyman Whitman, who owned this little panel, was a working artist in Boston. She studied painting there and in 1877 went to France to work with Thomas Couture at his country studio at Villiers-le-Bel, north of Paris. From the 1880s she designed stained glass, including windows for Trinity Church in Boston and for Memorial Hall at Harvard, and more than 200 book covers for the publishers Houghton Mifflin, at a time when covers were usually left to binders and die-cutters. She bought the Daubigny from the Galerie Beugniet, a Paris dealer, and when she died in 1904 she left it to the Museum of Fine Arts.

The panel is only 24 by 44 centimetres. Farm buildings and a clump of trees stand on the left bank and are mirrored in the still water, and the far shore rises low on the right. Daubigny signed it at the lower right, and he dated it too, but only the first two figures of the year can still be read.