Convalescent Mother and a Child

Within a couple of years of being painted, this small panel was already in Boston. In January 1873 the Boston Art Club showed it under a shorter title, The Convalescent, lent by its owner, the Boston collector George A. Bethune. The subject is a woman getting over an illness, with her child close by, a private moment in a plain Dutch home. The museum dates it to about 1871.

Bethune died in 1886, and that May his collection was auctioned in Boston. The panel was lot 40. It went to George A. Goddard, another Bostonian, who gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts the following year. The museum registered the gift on 6 December 1887, when Israëls was 63 and still painting in The Hague.