Portrait of a Child

In 1771 the engraver Jean-Baptiste Lucien made a print of this child's head, and at that time the painting belonged to Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, one of the leading sculptors in Paris. That print is the firmest early fact about the picture, and it tells us it was painted before 1771. The museum calls it attributed to Greuze, which means probably his, without proof. After Pigalle the trail grows faint. It may be the child's head sold in Paris in 1868 from the collection of Khalil Bey, an Ottoman diplomat who also owned Courbet's Origin of the World. It certainly belonged later to the museum in Moscow now called the Pushkin, which sold it in 1921. From a New York collector it passed in 1943 to Edwin Abbot of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in 1949 he gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts in memory of his mother.