Goya's Duke of Wellington taken from London

In the early hours of Monday 21 August 1961, someone took a small portrait from the National Gallery in London. It was the first theft in the Gallery’s history. The Guardian reports, from the file of the Director of Public Prosecutions (the official who decides prosecutions in England and Wales), that the painting stood on an easel in a roped-off area at the top of the main stairs. The thief came in through building works at the back and a men’s lavatory window that had apparently been left unlatched. The picture had been on show for only 19 days.

It was Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington. Goya painted it in Madrid in 1812, probably from life, after Wellington entered the city, in oil on wood. It measures 64.3 by 52.4 centimetres. On 14 June 1961 it sold at Sotheby’s, in the sale of the Duke of Leeds, to Charles Wrightsman, a collector in New York. The price was 140,000 pounds. This was a hammer price, because buyers’ premiums did not exist in London until 1975. Export of the picture caused public and parliamentary concern. Wrightsman offered it to the Gallery at his price. The Wolfson Foundation gave 100,000 pounds and the government 40,000 pounds. The portrait went on show on 2 or 3 August.

The first ransom note was posted on 31 August 1961. Over four years more arrived at news agencies and newspapers, written in capitals. One said the painting would not be sold but ransomed for 140,000 pounds, to be given to charity. Later notes asked that the money pay for television licences for old and poor people. In May 1965 a left-luggage ticket reached the Daily Mirror. On the evening of 21 May the painting was found at the left-luggage office at Birmingham New Street station, wrapped in brown paper and without its frame. Michael Levey of the Gallery said it was the genuine picture, the New York Times reported.

On 19 July 1965 Kempton Bunton went to West End Central police station and said he had taken it. Bunton was 61, a retired bus driver from Newcastle upon Tyne. Most sources call him a bus driver, although one Guardian report says truck driver. He had campaigned against the television licence fee for pensioners. At the Old Bailey in November 1965 he faced five charges. His counsel, Jeremy Hutchinson, argued that Bunton never meant to keep the painting, so under the law of the time it was not theft. The jury acquitted him of stealing the painting, of two charges of demanding money with menaces and of causing a public nuisance. It convicted him of stealing the frame, which was valued at 100 pounds and never recovered. He was sentenced to three months in prison. Bunton always said he acted alone.

The case did not end there. The Guardian reported in November 2012, from the Director of Public Prosecutions file released by The National Archives, that in July 1969 Bunton’s son John told police he had taken the painting. John Bunton had been arrested in Leeds for a minor offence. He said he gave the picture to his father. The Guardian attributes this account to the file. It was never tested in court, and John Bunton was never charged. The Director of Public Prosecutions took no action. The detective who led the 1961 inquiry wrote in 1969 that Kempton Bunton, a heavy man, was unlikely to have climbed the wall and window.

The portrait appeared in the 1962 film Dr No. It is now in the National Gallery, London, in Room 38, as NG6322.