Oasis

The first owner the museum's records can name is the painter himself. In 1901, when Jean-Léon Gérôme was 77, he sold this canvas to Boussod, Valadon and Company, the Paris and New York dealers who had succeeded the Goupil firm. Their stock book entered it as Chameaux buvant, camels drinking, and that is what it shows, camels at water in the desert, with the signature in capitals at the lower left. The museum dates the painting to about 1857, soon after Gérôme's first stay in Egypt, so the canvas may have stayed with him, or come back to him, for more than 40 years. On 30 October 1901 the dealers sold it to Edward Wolcott, who had represented Colorado in the United States Senate until that spring. After his death in 1905 it went to his brother, a clergyman in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and when the brother died he left it to a local trust there, the White Fund, which has lent it to the museum since November 1912.