Young Woman with Flowers in Her Hair

Boucher left no date on this canvas, and no one recorded who sat for it. He painted many oval heads like this one, the Museum of Fine Arts explains, pretty female types meant as ornament more than as portraits, with a flower in the hair and a gown slipping open at the neck.

The name arrived later, through the art market. A Paris auction in 1873 listed a Boucher portrait of the artist's wife, which may have been this picture. In 1936 an American art magazine called it a portrait of Madame Boucher that had come from a chateau in the Charente, and in 1944 the New York dealers Wildenstein sold it under that title to the collector Forsyth Wickes, saying it had belonged to the Rothschilds in Vienna. The museum has found no trace of it in the Rothschild inventories, and the chateau story was never confirmed.

Boucher's wife, Marie-Jeanne Buzeau, did model for him often, so the museum keeps her as a possibility. Wickes left his French collection to Boston, and the picture entered the museum in 1969.