Portrait of a Woman

Nobody knows who she is. The Museum of Fine Arts catalogues this canvas as William Hogarth's portrait of an unnamed woman, with no date, and its recorded history begins only in the 20th century, with a London dealer named C. Mason.

From London it crossed the Atlantic. By 1928 it was with P. Jackson Higgs, a New York dealer, who sold it that year to Vose Galleries, a family firm founded in 1841 with rooms in Providence and Boston. By 1929 it belonged to Charles W. Whittier, and by 1946 to Mrs Wingate Rollins of Milton, a town just south of Boston, who gave it to the museum in 1964.

Many English portraits of the 18th century lost their sitters' names this way, once they were sold out of the family that had commissioned them. The canvas measures 75 by 62.5 centimetres, about 30 by 25 inches, the standard size English painters called a three-quarters and used for a head and shoulders.