Harbor by Moonlight

Moonlit water had been a Dutch speciality since the 17th century, when Aert van der Neer made a career of rivers under the night sky. Jongkind, Dutch-born and living in France, came back to the subject again and again. This small harbour scene is signed and dated in the lower right, Jongkind 1871, and the Museum of Fine Arts does not identify the port. The picture reached Boston while he was still alive. In 1888 the Paris dealer Aimé Diot sold it to Henry Clay Angell, a Boston eye doctor who collected French landscape painting of the Barbizon generation. Angell died in 1911, his widow Martha gave his pictures to the museum in 1916, and it entered the collection fully on her death in 1919.