Farm on the Bank of a River

In 1889 a Boston eye doctor, Henry Clay Angell, bought this panel from the local dealers Noyes and Blakeslee. Angell had trained in homeopathic medicine, taught ophthalmology at Boston University and wrote a textbook on diseases of the eye, and he also painted a little himself. He was a friend of the Boston painter William Morris Hunt, and in 1881, two years after Hunt's death, he published a book of recollections of him. He and his wife Martha lived on Beacon Street, in the house that had belonged to the portrait painter Chester Harding.

The picture is a quiet stretch of riverbank, a farmhouse among tall trees and a cow drinking in the shallows, and Daubigny signed and dated it at the lower left, 1873. Angell died in 1911 and the pictures went to Martha, who gave the collection to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1916, and when she died three years later the paintings passed to the museum for good.