Portrait of Maria Bockenolle (Wife of Johannes Elison)

Maria Bockenolle was Dutch, but she had made her home in England, and Rembrandt painted her dressed the English way. The broad-brimmed hat is a style more often worn by men there, and the museum notes that it is lined with expensive fur, probably brought over from the Americas. Her husband's portrait surrounds him with books and papers. She sits simply, in front of a green curtain. The pair soon crossed the North Sea. After their son's death in 1677 they went to his sister, who had married into a Norfolk family, and they stayed with her descendants for almost two centuries. The English writer and collector Horace Walpole noted them in Great Yarmouth in 1763. They were sold at Christie's in London in 1860, spent nearly a hundred years with the Schneiders, the French ironmasters of Le Creusot, and were bought together for Boston in 1956 for 360,000 dollars.