Marine

John G. Johnson was the leading corporation lawyer in America around 1900, counsel to Standard Oil and U.S. Steel, and from the early 1880s he spent his fees on paintings. He kept them at home on South Broad Street in Philadelphia, packed so tightly that the painter George Biddle remembered finding two pictures by Chardin, the 18th-century French master, in his boot closet. This small seascape was one of them. Courbet dated it 1866, the year he spent part of the summer at Deauville on the Normandy coast as the guest of an aristocratic patron, the Comte de Choiseul. A squall hangs over the water in grey vertical streaks, and a few sailing boats run ahead of it off a pale strip of beach. When Johnson died in 1917 he left more than 1,300 works to the city, this one among them.