The Zuiderkerk, Amsterdam (Looking up the Groenburgwal)

The tower closing the view is the Zuiderkerk, the first church in Amsterdam built for Protestant worship, finished in 1611. Monet painted it from the Groenburgwal around 1874, with a pale lifting bridge over the water and a small house on the quay to the left. Where the canvas went next says something about who wanted this kind of painting first. By 1883 it belonged to Robert and Katherine Cassatt, an American couple living in Paris and the parents of the painter Mary Cassatt, who exhibited alongside Monet and encouraged her family to buy the new French painting. It passed to her brother Alexander, a Pennsylvania Railroad executive with a house at Haverford, outside Philadelphia, who later became the railroad's president. The Cassatts kept it until 1921, when the city of Philadelphia bought it for its museum with the Wilstach Fund, money left specifically for buying pictures.