Rue de la Bavole, Honfleur

In 1932 this picture hung in Zurich under a title that had lost its address, Street in a Normandy Town. It belonged then to Oscar Schmitz, a collector who had lived in Dresden and had moved his whole collection out of Germany to Switzerland the year before. The street is the rue de la Bavole, a narrow lane in the old port of Honfleur, and Monet painted it around 1864, in his early twenties. The Museum of Fine Arts calls the subject a fairly traditional one and points to what is new in the handling. Where the usual practice was to build up one overall tone through fine gradations, Monet sets pure colours side by side and lets them contrast. Schmitz had probably bought the canvas in 1915 from the Thannhauser gallery in Munich. After his death his estate sold the collection to the Wildenstein gallery in 1936, and in 1940 Wildenstein sold this picture to the Boston collector John Taylor Spaulding. It came to the museum with his bequest in 1948.