House of Mère Bazot, Valmandois

Daubigny was a sickly little boy in Paris, and his parents sent him to the country, to Valmondois, a village on a small river north of the city, to be looked after by a nurse whom everyone called Mère Bazot. He spent part of his childhood there, in her house among the orchards and meadows, and he kept going back long after he had grown up. In 1872, by then a famous painter living just a few kilometres away at Auvers-sur-Oise, he painted her house. The panel is wide and low, about 60 centimetres across. Farm buildings sit under tall trees, and in front of them a man ploughs with a team of horses. Daubigny signed and dated it at the lower left. Two years later he painted the same house again on a canvas nearly two metres wide, which is now in the Art Institute of Chicago. The Boston panel came first, and it sold fast. In 1873 the Paris dealers Goupil sold it to a collector in Boston.