Field of Poppies near Giverny

This field of poppies near Giverny has been in Boston since 1912 because a building in another town was never put up. Monet sold the canvas to Durand-Ruel on 31 October 1890, and in 1899 the dealer sold it to Edward O. Wolcott, a United States senator from Colorado. After the senator's death it passed to his brother William, pastor of a Congregational church in Lawrence, a mill town north of Boston. William Wolcott died in 1911 and left his pictures, 17 in all, to the White Fund, a Lawrence trust, for the benefit of the people of the city. His will asked that they be kept at the Museum of Fine Arts until Lawrence had a proper building in which to show them safely. That building never came, and more than a century later the Monet still hangs in Boston as the property of the trust. The White Fund organises visits so that schoolchildren and residents of Lawrence can come and see it.