Valley of the Petite Creuse

In March 1892 the St. Botolph Club in Boston put on the first exhibition in America given over to Monet alone. By one count, 21 of his pictures were owned in the city at the time, and this canvas was already among them. Clara Bertram Kimball had bought it the April before, through the J. Eastman Chase gallery in Boston, from the New York branch of Monet's dealer, Durand-Ruel. Monet had painted it in 1889 in the steep valley of the Petite Creuse, in central France. The Museum of Fine Arts points to how the effect is built, from layers of colour laid one over another, with broad strokes set against passages made of many small touches. Clara Kimball died in 1920 and left her pictures to her husband, David. When he died three years later he gave 40 of them to the museum in her memory, and his will described them as coming from the collection made by her and bequeathed to me.