Pool in the Forest

In February 1915 the Museum of Fine Arts opened a new wing for its paintings, facing the Fenway. One woman had paid for all of it. Maria Antoinette Evans asked for a single thing in return, a panel near the entrance in memory of her husband, Robert Dawson Evans, who had risen from a clerk's job to the presidency of the United States Rubber Company and had served as a trustee of the museum. When she died two years later, the couple's own pictures followed, and this small forest scene came with them. Théodore Rousseau painted it in the early 1850s. A pool lies in the shade of the wood, with cattle standing under the trees on the far side. Ponds hidden in the forest were a motif he painted many times. He signed this one at the lower right, and it still carries the family name in the museum's records, as part of the Robert Dawson Evans Collection.