Landscape with Ships on a River in the Evening

Daubigny painted a run of river evenings in the 1860s, and this one is unusually narrow, a strip of canvas about 60 centimetres across and 28 high, with room for the water and the boats of its title and little else. Its documented history turns on the 1940s. In the years after 1945 the picture came back to the Netherlands among the art recovered from Germany, and was placed in the custody of the Dutch state, which gave it the number NK2908. From 1998 an agency called Origins Unknown worked through the roughly 4,700 objects in that group, looking for the confiscations and forced sales behind them, some reaching back to 1933. The painting still carries its NK number and hangs in Amsterdam as a state loan.