Landscape near Dieppe

Thomas Gold Appleton was one of the famous talkers of 19th-century Boston, heir to a textile fortune, brother-in-law of the poet Longfellow, and the man credited with the line that good Americans, when they die, go to Paris. He spent long stretches in Europe, and there he came to know Constant Troyon personally.

The museum thinks this may be the Pasture in Normandy that Appleton lent to the Boston Athenaeum in 1858, years before the city had an art museum, when the Athenaeum's exhibitions were where Boston went to see paintings. Dieppe is a port on the Normandy coast, and the country behind it is pasture land of the kind Troyon painted all his life.

Appleton sat on the first board of trustees of the Museum of Fine Arts, and when he died in 1884 he left it three Troyons, this one among them. The canvas carries no date. Troyon signed it at the lower left in spaced capital letters.