Sunset by a River

Seth Morton Vose, an art dealer in Providence, Rhode Island, was among the first in America to buy the landscape painters of the French Barbizon circle, Daubigny among them, and for years he could hardly sell them. This canvas came into the country through his gallery and changed hands as the taste caught on. Vose sold it to a Providence collector, Beriah Wall, bought it back, and sold it again to Walter Richmond, who lent it to a charity exhibition in Providence in 1886. In 1899 it came up at auction in New York, and the Vose firm sold it on to Henry Clay Angell of Boston, the collector whose Corot and Millet pictures later came to the museum with this one.

Angell did something to it that the museum records in a note. He cut the canvas down from about 71 by 102 centimetres to roughly 49 by 90, and he painted over parts of the trees and the sky. The signature at lower right is probably a later addition, the museum catalogues the picture as attributed to Daubigny, and it dates it only to between 1865 and 1876. The one photograph of it the museum has published is in black and white.