Mary Sears (later Mrs. Francis Shaw)

At the Paris Salon of 1879 this portrait hung under a discreet title, Miss M. S., the initials of a young woman from Boston. She was Mary Sears, and her parents, Knyvet Winthrop Sears and Mary Peabody Sears, had commissioned the picture the year before. According to her family she sat for it in Bonnat's studio in Paris, and the museum records that Bonnat considered it one of his best. She later married Francis Shaw, which is why the museum's title carries both names.

The portrait stayed in the family for more than half a century. In 1930 her sister, Clara Endicott Sears, gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts. Clara was a writer and a founder of museums. In 1914 she had opened Fruitlands in the town of Harvard, Massachusetts, in the farmhouse where the philosopher Bronson Alcott, father of the novelist Louisa May Alcott, had tried to run a utopian community in 1843.