View of Semur

This museum owns Bernard's view of Semur twice. The two canvases are nearly the same size, and the one here measures 75.5 by 62 centimetres, its twin a few millimetres more in each direction. He was living at Tonnerre in Burgundy in those years, a train ride from the hill town of Semur, and by about 1910 landscape had taken over much of his output. In 1908 he sold a view of Semur to Andries Bonger in Amsterdam, a Dutch friend who was Theo van Gogh's brother-in-law and who bought Bernard's work in quantity. Both canvases stayed in Bonger's collection, and both came to this museum in December 1996, when the Dutch State acquired them.