In 1888, Theodore Earl Butler, a native of Columbus, Ohio, visited the small French town of Giverny where Impressionist painter, Claude Monet and his family had settled five years earlier. Soon after, he fell in love with one of Monet's stepdaughters, Suzanne Hoschedé, whom he married in 1892, becoming a permanent member of the Monet household. Many of Butler's works from the 1890s record aspects of domestic life painted in a decidedly impressionist manner. Undoubtedly influenced by Monet's series of London views painted between 1899 and 1904, Butler chose to record the bridge crossing the Seine River at Giverny during a fireworks display, a work that recalls Monet's representations of Charing Cross and Waterloo bridges that span the Thames. The ghost of a boat with sails glides through the water, a reference to James Abbott McNeil Whistler's nocturnes which he saw in Paris in 1904 at the artist's Memorial Exhibition. This important acquisition adds a new dimension to the Museum's growing holdings of American Impressionist painting, linking the 19th and 20th centuries. It also complements Claude Monet's two views of the Charing Cross and Waterloo bridges that entered the collection in 1945 and 1976 respectively.