The Babbling Brook

On a rock at the lower right Durand painted his signature and the year, A B Durand 1851. After that the picture drops out of sight for almost a century. It spent those years in a private house at Hannacroix, a hamlet in the Hudson Valley south of Albany, and surfaced only in 1945, when it passed through two dealers within the same year.

The buyer at the end of that chain was Maxim Karolik, a Russian-born singer settled in Newport, Rhode Island. He and his wife Martha, a Boston heiress, were collecting American painting from 1815 to 1865, a half-century that was then badly out of fashion. Here he got a quiet stretch of country, a brook running over stones, cattle in a meadow and a lake under distant hills.

Martha Karolik gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1947, one of the paintings that came to Boston under the Karolik name.