This picture is from the collection of James Jackson Jarves (1818-1888), maternal grandfather of the late owner's husband, Sir Howard Kerr. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Jarves travelled extensively in California, Mexico, Central America and the Hawaiian Islands, publishing a series of volumes about his experiences and about local history, before settling in Florence in 1852. There he began writing about art and rapidly acquired a large collection of early Italian pictures which he intended to make 'the nucleus of a Free Gallery in one of our largest cities', thus becoming the first American to create a collection of Italian painting as an instrument of education. In 1860 he published a 'Descriptive Catalogue of "Old Masters" collected by James Jackson Jarves to illustrate the History of Painting from A.D. 1200 to the Best Periods of Italian Art' and transported 145 pictures to America. There they were exhibited in New York in 1860 and 1863, but aroused little interest, Jarves's taste being very much ahead of his time, and in 1866 he contemplated taking them to England. In financial difficulties, in 1871 he sold the 119 which remained for $22,000 to Yale University where they are still the heart of the early Italian collection (see, for instance, C. Seymour, Jr., Early Italian Paintings in the Yale University Art Gallery, 1970). Jarves then formed a second collection which was included in the Boston Foreign Art Exhibition in 1883-4; 52 pictures from this, sold to his friend Liberty E. Holden in 1884, are now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. In 1881 he had already given his collection of Venetian glass to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and his collection of embroideries, laces, costumes and Renaissance fabrics, sold in New York in 1887, is now in the Farnsworth Museum, Wellesley College, Massachusetts.