Au bord de la Seine

This is a tiny thing, about the size of a postcard, and Renoir seems to have painted it in 1879 on a linen napkin at a restaurant along the Seine, working fast in the bright, broken brushwork of his high Impressionist years. The Baltimore collector Saidie May bought it in 1925 and left it to the museum. Then in 1951 it was stolen off the wall, and for more than 60 years nobody knew where it had gone. It surfaced again in 2012, when a woman said she had picked it up in a box lot at a Virginia flea market for seven dollars. A court sent it back to Baltimore in 2014.