Twilight

Henry Lee Higginson, a Boston banker, founded the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1881 and for more than 30 years covered its yearly losses out of his own pocket. By 1903 this small Corot was his. His wife, Ida, was a daughter of the Swiss-born naturalist Louis Agassiz of Harvard. When she died in 1935, 16 years after her husband, she left the picture to the Museum of Fine Arts in his memory. The museum dates it only broadly, between 1845 and 1860. Two dark trees lean in from either side, their branches almost meeting overhead, and between them the evening sky glows pale above a still lake. In the clearing below two young women are gathering fruit. One stands reaching up into the branches, the other kneels at the right, and a dark cloth lies spread on the grass between them.