Herd Crossing a Ford

Troyon signed and dated this canvas 1852, and on 19 February of that same year it was already under the hammer in Paris, at the Bonnet sale. The buyer was Adolphe Moreau, a Paris stockbroker who collected the painters of his own day.

Cows have walked into a shallow stream to drink and cool off. A tawny one stands nearest, looking out at us, a grey ox with long horns beside it and a dark brown cow half in the shade of the willows. A small black dog waits in the water on the right, and far off across the flat country a rider on a white horse is heading away.

The picture never left the Moreau family until it entered the Louvre. Adolphe's grandson, Étienne Moreau-Nélaton, a painter and art historian, gave the museum the family collection together with his own purchases in 1906, Manet's Luncheon on the Grass among them, on one condition, that nothing in the gift should ever be lent. Most of the modern pictures from that gift have since gone to the Musée d'Orsay. This one is still in the Louvre, in a room given over to the Moreau-Nélaton collection and the landscape painters of Barbizon.