We don’t know much about her, but what we can be certain about is that she sat for Simon Maris at his studio at 498 Keizersgracht in 1906, or thereabouts. She was about 12 years old at the time, as we can see from photographs Maris took at his studio. In surviving documents from Simon Maris’s archive he refers to her as ‘Isabella’, and other paintings of her by Maris were also given this title. Nonetheless, it is not certain that the girl’s name really was ‘Isabella’. It is possible that Maris came up with this name for her, or that she was using an alias, as many models did in that period.
Getting started with the collection: