Flowers and Fruit on a Table

This still life reached Boston by a long road through the European art trade. Early in the 20th century it belonged to a Brussels collector named de Hèle, and after his death it was sold at auction in Amsterdam in 1911 for 9,680 guilders. It then seems to have passed from Julien Tempelaere, a Paris dealer, to Alexander Reid in Glasgow. Reid, whose portrait Vincent van Gogh had painted in Paris in 1887, built up a stock of Fantin-Latour's pictures through his friendship with Tempelaere. From Reid the canvas probably went to David Cargill, a Glasgow collector, who lent it to a Fantin-Latour exhibition in New York in 1932. After Cargill died it moved through dealers in London and New York, and in 1941 the Boston collector John Taylor Spaulding bought it. He left it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1948. The inscription at the lower right, Fantin, 1865, dates it to the year the painter turned 29.