Mary Magdalen

When this panel was auctioned in Paris in March 1918, the catalogue called it the portrait of a woman and gave it to Bernard van Orley, court painter in Brussels to Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands. It was priced at 11,000 francs, yet it seems to have stayed with the family of its late owner, the Paris collector Lucien Claude-Lafontaine, and the family put it up for sale again in 1962.

The mistake is easy to understand. In the 1520s Netherlandish painters turned out many half-length Magdalenes dressed like great ladies of the court, and Gossaert painted this one in the later years of that decade, richly dressed and hung with jewels. She is shown before her conversion, in the finery she will give up. What names her is the gilded vessel in her hands, the jar of ointment for anointing Christ's feet, and the museum points out that Gossaert gave it the shape of an ancient urn.

The Massachusetts collector William A. Coolidge bought the panel from a New York dealer in 1963 and gave it to the museum in 1991.