Quay at Villefranche

In March 1899 the New York branch of the dealers Durand-Ruel sold this canvas to Edward O. Wolcott, a United States senator from Colorado. Wolcott had grown up in Massachusetts and made his name as a lawyer in Colorado, and in the Senate he was a leading advocate for coining silver alongside gold. In 1897 President McKinley sent him to Europe at the head of a commission to seek an international agreement on it. The picture he bought looks along a quay on the Mediterranean. Boudin painted it while working on the coast near Nice, and beside his signature he wrote the place and the day, Villefranche, 27 February 1892. Durand-Ruel bought it from him that May. On 1 March 1905, on another journey through Europe, Wolcott died at Monte Carlo, about 15 kilometres along the same coast. The painting passed to his brother William, a minister in Lawrence, Massachusetts, who left it to a Lawrence trust, the White Fund. Its trustees have kept it on deposit at the Museum of Fine Arts since November 1912.