Turn in the Road

In 1903 the Boston merchant Eben Dyer Jordan was spending his money on music. His family's department store, Jordan Marsh, had made him rich, and that October the New England Conservatory inaugurated the concert hall he had paid for on Huntington Avenue, still called Jordan Hall. In 1908 he put up 700,000 dollars to finish the Boston Opera House on the same avenue, and it opened in November 1909, a week before the Museum of Fine Arts opened its new building a short walk away. By 1903 he also owned this Corot. Before that it had been in Paris, and a label on the back still names an owner there, Albert de Saint-Albin, a journalist and playwright who wrote about horse racing and fencing. Tall, thin trees rise over a path that bends away into the light. A rider on horseback goes off down it, two women stand together at the right, one holding a small child, and at the lower left a woman bends to gather sticks. The canvas dates from about 1868 to 1870. Jordan died in 1916, and his son Robert gave the picture to the museum in 1924.