Sunset at Villerville

Villerville sits on the Normandy coast between Trouville and Honfleur, and Daubigny came back to it for years. He signed and dated this sunset there in 1874, four years before he died, on a canvas nearly 1.5 metres wide. By 1890 the painting was in The Hague, shown in a Daubigny exhibition at Pulchri Studio, the artists' society chaired since 1889 by Hendrik Willem Mesdag, a Hague painter known for his North Sea beaches. Mesdag bought it in January 1895 through the Paris dealers Boussod, Valadon and Company. He and his wife Sientje Mesdag-van Houten had already built a small museum next to their house for the French pictures they kept buying, and in 1903 they gave the whole thing to the Dutch state. It is still there, on the Laan van Meerdervoort, in a collection the Van Gogh Museum has managed since 1990.