春天的牧场

Pissarro signed and dated this in 1889 and sold it that July to Boussod and Valadon in Paris, the firm whose boulevard Montmartre branch Theo van Gogh was running and which took Impressionist pictures when few other dealers would. Three years later it was bought by Edward Wolcott, a senator from Colorado who had made his money in the silver camps, which is how the canvas crossed to America barely a decade after it was painted. His brother left it to the White Fund, a charitable trust in the mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, endowed to pay for free public lectures. The fund put the painting on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1912 and it has hung there since. Pissarro was working then around Éragny, the village north-west of Paris where he had rented a house in 1884.