Portrait of a Woman

Around 1941 an antique dealer in Detroit bought up the household goods left by an Englishwoman who had come to live in the city, and this small painted head of a woman was among them. Ira S. Parke of Amherst, Massachusetts, bought it from him, wrote down what the dealer had told him, and in 1961 gave the picture to the Museum of Fine Arts. The museum dates it to about 1818 and catalogues it as attributed to Constable, close to his hand without being certain. In those years portraits were a steady source of income for him, at a time when his landscapes sold slowly. The sitter's name is not known. The board it is painted on measures only about 22 centimetres each way.