Ritratto di una donna detta Hylck Boner

Hals painted this woman in 1635 and nobody has managed to settle who she was. The name attached to her is Hylck Boner, wife of a Frisian lawyer called Johannes Saeckma, proposed because the picture was thought to pair with a portrait of him. Seymour Slive, who catalogued Hals in the 1970s, wrote that the identification remained uncertain, and the Frick lists her to this day as simply a woman. What is certain is how she reached New York. She belonged to Charles Yerkes, the Chicago streetcar magnate who also financed three lines of the London Underground, and when his collection was auctioned in New York in April 1910, five years after his death, Henry Clay Frick bought her. He was then buying Dutch portraits steadily for a Fifth Avenue house he had not yet begun to build.