Head of a Woman in Profile

The museum dates this head to the second half of the 1850s and gives the woman no name. Couture marked it with nothing more than his initials, T.C., at the lower left. She is seen in profile with her eyes lowered, her hair pinned up, a loose pale wrap slipping from her shoulder, and the dark ground around her is brushed in quickly.

Its early history rests on one letter. In 1941 the secretary of the donor told the museum that the picture had once belonged to John Taylor Johnston of New York, a railway magnate and the first president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Johnston sold his collection at auction in December 1876, after heavy losses in the financial panic of 1873, and lot 35 in that sale was a female head by Couture. The museum has never confirmed the link, and the sizes do not quite agree, since lot 35 was listed at 19 by 16 inches and this canvas is about 22 by 18.

The firmer part of the story is in Boston. In 1882 or 1883 the dealer J. Eastman Chase sold the head to Peter Chardon Brooks, a Boston merchant's heir, and his daughter, Eleanor Saltonstall, gave it to the museum in 1920, the year he died.