Théodore Rousseau (French, 1812-1867)

The present picture belonged to several of the most important Gilded Age collections in America, including the founders of two different museums. Samuel Putnam Avery was a founder and long-time trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as well as the founder of the Avery Library at Columbia University, an esteemed art and architecture reference collection. Elbert Henry Gary, who owned the picture after Avery, was a founder of U.S. Steel, alongside his partners J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and Charles M. Schwab. Finally, the work was owned by Henry Walters, an art collector and philanthropist whose extensive collection would go on to form the basis of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.