Paul Verlaine

This head of Paul Verlaine is about 19 centimetres high, smaller than a sheet of writing paper. The museum dates it to about 1891. Carrière had painted the poet the year before, in a larger portrait now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and here the bald forehead and the beard come up again, close to, out of the brown haze that was his manner. In 1891 Verlaine was 47, the elder admired by the young Symbolist poets, poor, and often in Paris hospitals.

Nobody knows who owned the little canvas first. By 1921 it belonged to Louis Kronberg, a Boston-born painter of ballet dancers who spent long stretches in Paris and bought pictures there for the Boston collector Isabella Stewart Gardner. In a letter to the museum in 1939 he said he had found it at a small dealer in Paris. He sold it in 1934 to Vose Galleries, and Vose sold it to the Museum of Fine Arts the same year for 340 dollars.