Provenance

• By 1905: Mrs H. S. Schwann (dates unknown);
• 1924: sold by David Croal Thomson (1855-1930), Barbizon House, to Scott and Fowles, New York, and by them to an American collector.
• Date unknown: Ellen Henderson (1869-1935);
• Date unknown: Hunt Henderson (1869-1939), New Orleans;
• 1939: passed to his wife Jeanne Montgomery Crawford (Mrs Hunt Henderson) (dates unknown), and to their son, Charles Crawford Henderson (d. 2016), and his wife, New Orleans.
• 1972: Knoedler's, New York dealers, by February 1972.
• 1975: sold at auction, Christie's, London, 28 February 1975 (lot 18), and bought by Paul F. Walter (1935-2017), New York;
• 1997: sold at auction, Christie's, New York, 4 December 1997 (lot 21) for $85,000.
• 2015: Berger Collection Educational Trust.

Mrs H. S. Schwann lent it to the Whistler Memorial Exhibition in 1905. According to the London art dealer David Croal Thomson (1855-1930), it was sold through Scott & Fowles to an unnamed American collector. There are several gaps in the recorded provenance thereafter.

The Berger Collection Educational Trust was started in 1996 by the late William M. B. Berger and his wife Bernadette Johnson Berger, and is housed at Denver Art Museum.

Exhibitions

• 1905: Memorial Exhibition of the Works of the late James McNeill Whistler, First President of The International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, New Gallery, Regent Street, London, 1905 (cat. no. 107) as 'Petite bonne a la porte d'une Auberge'.

It is not known to have been exhibited in Whistler's lifetime.