Village Road

Daubigny signed and dated this small panel in the lower left corner, 1861. That year he had a house and studio built at Auvers-sur-Oise, a village on the Oise north of Paris, on land he had bought the year before, with a studio room more than seven metres high under the roof. The picture itself is modest, a country road with a single figure walking toward a few low houses, a large tree on the right and a wide sky over flat ground.

When it was auctioned in Boston in 1905 it was called The Country Road. It was bought by Robert Dawson Evans, a Boston businessman, and his wife Maria Antoinette. After his death in 1909 she paid for a new wing of painting galleries at the Museum of Fine Arts, named after him and opened in 1915, and when she died in 1917 she left their pictures to the museum, this panel among them.