Isabella

It is a small canvas, about 41 by 29 centimetres, and Maris never gave it a title. It shows a girl seated in a lace hat, holding a fan. For almost a century its labels gave her no name at all, only a vague description of the kind of girl she seemed to be. What changed that was the Maris family archive, where photographs and papers show the same girl posing around 1906 in his studio at Keizersgracht 489 in Amsterdam. They give her first name, Isabella, and her age, about 12. The picture reached the Rijksmuseum in 1922 in the bequest of an Amsterdam collector, Andries van Wezel, and has carried her name since 2020. One question is still open. Nobody has yet found Isabella's surname, and the museum says it is still searching for it, in the hope that it would tell more about who she was.