Portrait of a Man

Across the top of this portrait Carrière wrote, in French, to my friend Bertaux, then his name and the year 1879. That inscription is nearly all we have about the sitter. The museum takes him to be the Bertaux of the dedication and still puts a question mark beside it, and no first name has come down with the picture.

In 1879 Carrière was 30, a few years married and not yet known. A head painted for a friend and handed over with a few words across the top was a common courtesy among young artists in Paris. By 1909 this one had travelled to New York and was in the hands of Durand-Ruel, the Paris dealers who had built an American market for the Impressionists. That year they sold it to Frank Gair Macomber, a Boston collector who was born, like Carrière, in 1849, and Macomber gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1936.