Solitude

In May 1893 the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, a breakaway exhibition founded only three years before, showed this wide, dark canvas by the American painter Alexander Harrison, and the French state bought it from him that same year. Almost everything in it is water and shadow. In the middle distance, against a black wall of trees, a pale skiff rests on a still pond. A nude figure stands in it with arms raised to the head, and an oar lies across the side, its blade the brightest thing in the picture. Below, figure and boat break up into a faint reflection, and a few lily pads float on the surface. From 1894 it hung in the Musée du Luxembourg, then passed through two other Paris collections before reaching Orsay.