Harvesting

Anna Boch first showed this picture in Brussels in 1891, and that same year she sent it to the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. At that exhibition Georges Seurat, who had pioneered the technique of small separate touches of colour she uses here, hung his unfinished Circus, and he died before the show closed. A girl in a wide straw hat, a basket on her arm, moves through a sunlit kitchen garden gathering red and orange flowers. Behind her the long sloping glass roof of a greenhouse catches the light, and in the lower corner the cabbages are built from blues and violets. The painting became the first work by Boch in the Musée d'Orsay in 2024, a gift from a fund for foreign artists made through the museum's friends' society.