Portrait of a Woman
Details
The story
When Henry K. Oliver, a Boston doctor, lent this portrait to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1895, nobody could name the painter. It was shown as the work of an unknown Spanish artist, and it was believed to represent Henrietta Maria, the French-born queen of Charles I of England. Oliver had inherited it in 1888 from Sarah Thacher of Boston, and in 1918 he turned the loan into a gift.
The museum now gives the picture to Juan Carreño de Miranda, the painter who rose to serve the Spanish court in Madrid, and dates it broadly, to between about 1650 and 1670. It has dropped the queen's name and no longer identifies the woman at all. The canvas is small, a little under 60 centimetres high.
