Portrait of an Unknown Woman
Description:
Oil on canvas, bust length oval, full face, hair parted in centre, 27 x 22 ins., signed upper right ‘Adolph Muller’. Frame, 36 x 31 ins.
Provenance:
MV Auctions, 85 Main Street, Buzzards Bay, MA02532, USA, March 30, 2004, Lot 32, as ‘19th c. oil on canvas portrait of a lady, signed Adolf Muller’.
For sale on Ebay with a dealer called Rob Derrick in East Providence, Rhode Island, in August 2013.
With this form of his signature it is evidently a portrait painted in Muller-Ury’s first year in New York, so between December 1884 and the end of 1885.
The picture looks as if it is a portrait made from a photograph. The likelihood is that the picture was commissioned by an early patron in Brooklyn, perhaps from the Brandeis/Dougherty family.
