Summer

In January 1873 the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston had a charter and trustees but no building. It had been founded three years earlier, and its first home in Copley Square would not open until 1876. This canvas, more than two and a half metres tall, was one of its earliest gifts. A Boston dealer had shown it in the city from 1867 under the title Field Flowers, Midsummer, and a Bostonian named Richard Baker bought it and gave it to the new museum. His widow later recalled that he made the purchase on the advice of Henry Kidder, one of the founding trustees. Doré, the illustrator of Dante and the Bible, painted many landscapes in the 1860s, and none quite like this one. It looks at an untended corner of ground from a bug's-eye view, hollyhocks, morning glories, dandelions, daisies and thistles crowding upward, with butterflies and dragonflies feeding among them. A scythe lies rusting in the foreground, and a ruined building crumbles behind the weeds.