Woman with a Taper

Breton dated this canvas 1873, and on 22 January 1874 it was bought by Goupil, the Paris dealing house with branches across Europe. The firm's stock number is still stencilled on the back. Goupil entered it in its books as Devotion, which is a fair name for what it shows: a young woman in a white lace cap, standing in profile against an old stone wall with a lit taper in one hand and a rosary in the other.

By August 1874 it had been sold to a Mr. Williams of Boston, probably the dealers Williams and Everett, and the next spring it seems to have been lent, as Devotee, to an exhibition at the Boston Art Club by a Bostonian named Thomas Wigglesworth. From then on it never left the city. Wigglesworth's niece Henrietta inherited it, and it passed to her son, Edward Jackson Holmes, a grandson of the writer Oliver Wendell Holmes, who served the Museum of Fine Arts as its director and then as president of its trustees. He gave it to the museum in 1941.