Rising Ground Near Villeneuve-St. Georges

Villeneuve-Saint-Georges lies on the Seine about 15 kilometres upstream of Paris, where the small river Yerres flows in. Daubigny lived and worked mostly on the other side of the capital, at Auvers on the Oise, and this view south of the city dates from 1875, three years before his death. There is no river in the picture. The lower half is a soaked meadow with pools of standing rainwater, a cart track climbs the slope on the left, and a few trees stand on the crest under a heavy, broken sky. He signed and dated it at the lower left.

Within a generation it had crossed the Atlantic. In April 1899 it was auctioned in New York with the collection of Edward Holbrook and fetched 4,000 dollars. By 1908 it belonged to the Boston couple Robert Dawson Evans and Maria Antoinette Evans, who lent it that year to a Copley Society exhibition in Boston called French School of 1830, a common American label then for Daubigny's generation of landscape painters.