Young Boy

In May 1878 a Paris collector called Laurent-Richard, a tailor by trade, sent his pictures to auction at the Hôtel Drouot. He was known above all for the landscape painters of Barbizon, but the sale had older French pictures too, and among them was this small head of a boy, catalogued as Greuze. It was bought by Alphonse Legrand, probably on behalf of Quincy Adams Shaw of Boston. Shaw had made a fortune in copper mining in Michigan, and much of it went on art, above all on the paintings and pastels of Jean-François Millet.

After Shaw died in 1908, his family gave his Millets to the Museum of Fine Arts. The boy stayed with the family. He came down to Shaw's grandson, Louis Agassiz Shaw, and reached the museum only in 1991, as a gift from his estate, 113 years after the sale in Paris. The museum keeps the cautious label attributed to Greuze.