Lake George

Heade signed this canvas M J Heade, 62, at the lower right, and that year it went on sale at Seth Vose's gallery in Providence, Rhode Island. Lake George, in upstate New York, had long been one of the favourite sketching grounds of American landscape painters, after the Hudson River, the Catskills and Niagara. Heade gives it a long, low format, almost twice as wide as it is tall, with flat ledges of rock running out into still water and a man with a small boat at the water's edge. Another boat sits far out on the lake. Among the picture's later owners was Elmer Capen, president of Tufts College outside Boston, whose collection was auctioned in New York in 1889. In 1948 it returned to the same family firm, the Vose gallery, by then based in Boston, and the collector Maxim Karolik bought it there. He left it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1964.