Stories of a collection: How Boston embraced Impressionism

In 1891, while Claude Monet was finishing his series of Grainstack paintings for exhibition at Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery in Paris, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) put on display for the first time two earlier works by the artist: Snow at Argenteuil, c. 1874, and Fisherman’s cottage on the cliffs at Varengeville, 1882, lent by local collector Anna Perkins Rogers. She purchased these from Durand-Ruel during a trip to Paris in 1890 and less than a year later, lent the paintings to the MFA – allowing exemplary works by one of France’s leading artists to be shared with Boston audiences.¹Snow-storm and a Sea-piece were lent by Miss Annette (Anna) P. Rogers in 1891. See Trustees of the Museum of Fine Arts, Sixteenth Annual Report for the Year Ending Dec. 31, 1891, Alfred Mudge & Son, Printers, Boston, 1892, p. 62. She later bequeathed the two paintings to the MFA, becoming one of many such collectors whose generosity has formed the heart of the MFA’s Impressionist collection.

Rogers was part of the rich network of Boston artists and collectors who encouraged the MFA’s early embrace of Impressionism. She was an accomplished still-life and landscape painter who studied with William Morris Hunt, one of Boston’s most prominent artists in the mid nineteenth century. Hunt formed close ties with painters Jean-François Millet, Thomas Couture and Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña during travels to France in the 1850s. He collected their work, particularly that of Millet, promoted it among other art enthusiasts, and imparted his love of French landscape upon the many students he later taught, like Rogers. He wrote of Millet: ‘When I came to know Millet I took broader views of humanity, of the world, of life. If he painted a haystack it suggested life, animal as well as vegetable, and the life of man. His fields were the fields in which men and animals worked; where both laid down their lives; where the bones of the animals were ground up to nourish the soil, and the endless turning of the wheel of existence went on.’²William Morris Hunt, in Mahonri Sharp Young, ‘William Morris Hunt: a proper Bostonian’, Apollo, Jan. 1966, pp. 24–9; cited in Denys Sutton, ‘The long affair’, Apollo, Jan. 1970, p. 4. From 1849, Millet lived in the village of Barbizon near the Forest of Fontainebleau, and became closely associated with the group of painters known as the Barbizon school – who, like Millet, found beauty in rustic views of rural subjects. The direct, honest approach of Millet, so admired by Hunt, also appealed to Boston collectors, who donated a number of paintings by Millet and his Barbizon colleagues to the MFA during the 1870s–80s. These earthy landscapes laid the groundwork for the non-idealised views of everyday life and the French countryside that would become a hallmark of Impressionism, and gain attention among the next generation of Boston collectors in the decades to follow. By the 1890s, Bostonians were acquiring Impressionist pictures, especially those by Monet, in remarkable numbers.

Monet’s grainstack paintings evoke expressions of the human experience, a sentiment that was also used by Hunt to describe pictures by Millet of the same motif. Upon seeing Monet’s 1891 Grainstack exhibition at Durand-Ruel’s gallery, painter Theodore Robinson wrote to Bostonian Thomas Sergeant Perry: ‘it is colossal, something, the same grave, almost religious feeling there is often in Millet, with at the same time the charm of realism. To me they are a little finer than any previous work of his.’³Theodore Robinson, in Katie Hanson, Monet: Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2020, p. 66

Grainstack (Snow effect), 1891, one of fifteen works included in the show at Durand-Ruel’s, was purchased a month later by Horatio Appleton Lamb and his new wife, Annie (Lawrence Rotch), while they were on their honeymoon in Paris. The newlywed couple were both from prominent Boston families, and acquired a significant collection of nineteenth-century paintings including works by Barbizon and Impressionist artists. Mr Lamb’s sister had also studied painting with Hunt and may have influenced his collecting interests.⁴The Lambs’s daughters, Misses Aimée and Rosamond Lamb, donated Monet, Grainstack (Snow effect), 1891, oil on canvas, 1970.253, to the MFA in 1970. Other collectors relied on the advice of local artists, such as J. Foxcroft Cole, who travelled to Paris and purchased works on behalf of collectors back home in Boston. In 1890, he purchased three Monets for philanthropist Peter Chardon Brooks, including Boulevard Saint-Denis, Argenteuil, 1875.⁵Monet, Boulevard Saint-Denis, Argenteuil, 1875, oil on canvas, 1978.633, passed down to Brooks’s descendants and was later donated in 1978. Two years later, Boston’s St. Botolph Club mounted the first non-commercial monographic exhibition of Monet’s work. Featuring twenty-one loans drawn entirely from local collections, the show included the paintings from Rogers, Lamb and Brooks – and according to the show’s organiser, Desmond Fitzgerald, it could have easily featured ‘twenty more pictures by the same hand, were the gallery large enough to show them to advantage’.⁶Monet, Desmond Fitzgerald, An Exhibition of Paintings by Claude Monet, St. Botolph Club, Boston, 1892, n.p.

While the MFA’s Impressionist collection primarily comprises gifts and bequests from generous local donors, key purchases throughout the institution’s 150-year-long history have added highlights to its holdings, such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Dance at Bougival, 1883, purchased in 1937, and Gustave Caillebotte’s Man at his bath, 1884, purchased in 2011. Through its acquisition in 1903, Edgar Degas’s Racehorses at Longchamp, 1871, possibly reworked in 1874, reveals a remarkable story of collaboration between the MFA and the local artistic community. Degas was still an active contemporary artist and a progressive choice for the MFA to consider at a time when no other American museum owned his work. In the spring of that year, MFA president Samuel D. Warren arranged shipment of Degas’s Orchestra musicians, 1872 (Städel Museum, Frankfurt), and subsequently, Racehorses at Longchamp from Durand-Ruel’s New York gallery to the MFA to evaluate for purchase. Warren enlisted director Edward Robinson to ‘kindly obtain any available expert opinions as to its [Racehorses] merits in comparison with the other [Orchestra musicians]’.⁷Letter from Samuel D. Warren to Edward Robinson, 23 Apr. 1903, MFA archives.

Robinson sought out local art figures to weigh in. Frederic P. Vinton, an artist and advocate of Impressionist art, recommended Racehorses without question, as one of the finest examples of Degas’s work on this subject, although he remarked that Orchestra musicians ‘is one of that painter’s best works – as far as the quality is concerned’.⁸Transcript of recorded observations, 27 Apr. 1903, MFA archives. He also advised Warren to seek the opinion of Edmund Tarbell, who ‘has made a serious study of Degas, whom, by the way, he regards as the greatest of modern painters’.⁹Letter from Frederic P. Vinton to Samuel D. Warren, 5 Apr. 1903, MFA archives. Indeed, Tarbell wrote Robinson to convey his enthusiasm: ‘Degas pictures give me as much pleasure as those of any painter who ever lived.’¹⁰Letter from Edmund Tarbell to Edward Robinson, Apr. 1903, MFA archives. After training in Paris, Tarbell became a leading figure of the Boston School, a group of painters identified with American Impressionism. He strongly admired Racehorses, but in consideration of his role as a faculty member of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA), he thought that Orchestra musicians had more to offer students.¹¹Transcript of recorded observations, 28 Apr. 1903, MFA archives. Like Tarbell, Frank W. Benson studied in France and joined the faculty of the SMFA, becoming a major proponent of plein-air painting and Impressionism. Regarding Racehorses, Benson expressed to Warren: ‘I find the Degas is an old acquaintance of mine and one that I am very fond of. I wish very much that it might be owned by the Museum because I think it is a fine Degas and because he no longer produces pictures like this…’¹²Letter from Frank W. Benson to Samuel D. Warren, Apr. 1903, MFA archives.

While these experts were divided in opinion, there was overwhelming support for the acquisition of any work by Degas. Ultimately, the MFA decided upon Racehorses at Longchamp, becoming the first American museum to acquire a painting by the artist.¹³13 Jean Sutherland Boggs et al., Degas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1988, p. 159. Orchestra musicians was acquired by the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, in 1912. Such bold purchases would have been unlikely to occur without the established support within the museum and among the local artistic community for modern French art. This long history of generous collaboration among artists, collectors and the MFA laid the foundation for Boston’s enduring devotion to Monet and his contemporaries that has continued throughout the twentieth century and beyond.

Julia Welch is Assistant Curator of Paintings, Art of Europe at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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