Sidewalk Café

In 1898 Robert Henri married Linda Craige, one of his students, and the two spent the next two years in France on a long working honeymoon. In 1899 the French government bought his snowy view of a Paris street, La Neige, for the Musée du Luxembourg, the state's museum of living artists. For an American painter of 34 it was a rare honour.

This canvas, painted about the same time, had no such luck. It shows people at little round tables in the shade of big trees, the women in hats with touches of pink and white against the dark, and a sunlit square behind them. The museum does not name the café. Henri signed it at the lower left and kept it. It was still in his estate, 30 years after his death in 1929, when the New York dealers Hirschl and Adler sold it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1959.