Seated Nude (Les Regrets)

Henry Clay Angell was an eye doctor in Boston, from 1873 professor of ophthalmology at the new medical school of Boston University, and in his spare time he collected French paintings, among them works by Boudin and Jongkind. In 1875, the year Millet died, this little panel was bought for him in Paris by J. Foxcroft Cole, a Boston landscape painter who had trained in France and knew the trade there. It is only 25 centimetres high, and the museum dates it to 1847 or 1848. A young woman sits naked on a blue-green cloth spread on the ground, turned away from us, her knees drawn up and her head sunk onto her arm against a pale rock. The dark growth behind her is put in with quick, loose strokes. Angell kept it until his death in 1911. His widow, Martha, gave their collection to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1916, and when she died three years later the panel became the museum's outright.