Roses in a Vase

This small canvas, about 36 by 28 centimetres, is inscribed Fantin 72. In 1911 it appeared in the catalogue of his complete work that his widow, the painter Victoria Dubourg, published seven years after his death, where it was listed as belonging to a Madame Esnault-Pelterie in Paris.

From there it crossed the Atlantic, through the Paris dealer Tempelaere and Kraushaar Galleries in New York, to Sarah Choate Sears of Boston. Sears had trained as a painter and around 1900 became one of the city's best-known art photographers, admired by Alfred Stieglitz's circle in New York, and flowers were among her own subjects. John Singer Sargent painted her portrait, and with Isabella Stewart Gardner she was one of the people who set the taste of Boston collecting at the turn of the century. After her death in 1935 the roses went to her daughter Helen, who sold them to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1940 for 350 dollars.