Portrait of a Young Woman in a Red Robe

The museum gives this canvas no date and names no sitter. It belongs to a type Henner painted again and again, a young woman on her own, sometimes facing us and sometimes, as here, turned in profile. The title calls it a portrait, yet nothing records who she was, and the only thing it names is the robe she wears.

Such pictures found eager buyers in America. The first work by Henner to enter an American museum was a bather commissioned by the New York collector Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, who left it to the Metropolitan Museum in 1887. This one came to Boston 30 years later, in 1917, in the bequest of Maria Antoinette Evans. Henner signed it at the lower left.