Portrait de femme

This small head of a young woman, her auburn hair piled high and a dark bow at her throat, belongs to a gift made to the Louvre in 1961 in the names of Hélène and Victor Lyon. The gift came with a condition. Their son Édouard kept the use of the pictures, and only in 1977, when that right ended, did they come to the museum. The Louvre knows little else about the painting. It does not name the sitter, and its catalogue dates the canvas no more precisely than the late 19th or early 20th century. It is barely 36 centimetres high, and it hangs with the rest of the Lyon gift in Room 903 of the Sully wing.