Ile-de-Vaux on the Oise near Auvers

Léonide Bourges, a painter who studied with Daubigny, called the Île de Vaux his headquarters. It is a long, thin island in the Oise at Auvers, about 1.2 kilometres long and barely 80 metres wide, and by one local count Daubigny painted it and the river arm beside it more than 30 times. His son Karl had made his own Salon debut in 1863 with a view of the same island.

This panel is one of the late ones, signed and dated 1876, two years before Daubigny died. The wooded island lies low on the water under a yellow evening sky, with reeds along the near bank.

In 1883 the Paris firm of Goupil bought it, and within three years it had passed through the Georges Petit gallery in Paris and Knoedler in New York to a Boston dealer, who sold it to Clara Bertram Kimball in 1886. It came to the museum in 1923 under her bequest.