Portrait of a Woman

Couture signed this head with nothing more than his initials, a T and a C at the lower left. The museum dates it to the early 1850s and gives the woman no name. In those years his Paris studio drew students from America. The painter William Morris Hunt worked there before moving on to Barbizon, and once he had made his home in Boston he kept urging collectors in the city to buy French painting.

This small canvas reached New England by its own route. In 1886 it belonged to Thomas Robinson of Providence, Rhode Island, and when his pictures were auctioned in New York that November it probably went to the Vose gallery, dealers with rooms in Providence and Boston. In 1890 Vose sold it to Susan Cornelia Warren, widow of the Boston paper manufacturer Samuel Dennis Warren and mother of Edward Perry Warren, the collector who gathered Greek antiquities for the Museum of Fine Arts. She gave the portrait to the museum soon afterwards.