The Duke of Wellington, Kidnapped!

by Alan Hirsch

  Other members of Parliament, less interested in pillorying Lloyd than proposing a solution, emphasized that the nation was not without legal recourse and urged action to prevent the loss of The Duke. British law decreed that artworks more than fifty years old have an export license, and some suggested that Wrightsman be denied one. Lloyd agreed to look into whether “a license should be refused because of the picture’s national importance.” He would refer the matter to the appropriate body—the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art.

  British law also authorized a seven-month freeze on the export license to enable the raising of funds to keep the work in the UK. Though this law may seem a quirky carryover from quaint times, it accommodates a reality that continues to surface in the modern art world. For example, in 2003 the law was invoked to freeze the sale of Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the National Gallery subsequently raised £39 million to purchase the work and prevent its export.a

  The United States witnessed a similar phenomenon in 2008 when Walmart heiress Alice Walton purchased Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic from the Philadelphia medical school where it had hung for seven decades. Walton intended to bring the painting to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, but public and private funds combined to trump Walton’s offer and keep the painting in Philadelphia.

  Would such a law be invoked in 1961 to prevent an American from raiding England’s treasures and taking The Duke of Wellington? Chancellor Lloyd said that this question, too, would be referred to the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art. But after the government froze the sale, the legal maneuvering was short-circuited by Wrightsman. Fortunately for the UK, The Duke’s new owner was allergic to controversy. (He once remarked that “Mrs. Wrightsman and I lead a very quiet life and we try to avoid publicity. . . . I had a father who told me, ‘I never saw a deaf and dumb man in jail.’”) He offered the painting back to the National Gallery at cost, because he “would not wish to export the painting if it was considered of overriding aesthetic and historical importance to Great Britain.”

  That still left the National Gallery in the position of needing to raise £140,000. Its director, Sir Philip Hendy, declared that the gallery could not raise such an amount by itself but would be delighted if others came to its assistance. The London Times revealed that, in the run-up to the original Sotheby’s auction, the gallery trustees had raised a mere £8,600, which explains why the gallery hadn’t bid—the bidding began at £10,000. Even raising the £8,600 had been a hardship, requiring the gallery to use all its available resources as well as successfully elicit a £5,000 contribution from the National Art-Collections Fund. Perhaps the gallery could have come up with more if anyone had anticipated that an American would win the bidding.

  In any event, upon hearing Wrightsman’s offer, a Conservative member of the House of Commons, Sir Hamilton Kerr, called on Chancellor Lloyd to commit the government to making a special grant to the gallery to acquire the painting. As it happens, only limited government largesse proved necessary. In early August, the Wolfson Foundation, a private philanthropic organization established six years earlier and dedicated to funding the arts and sciences, agreed to contribute £100,000, or five-sevenths of the purchase price. Parliament approved the remaining £40,000, which was provided by way of a special Exchequer grant. All ended well: Goya’s Duke remained in England, and everyone hailed the public–private partnership that made possible his rescue from the foreign predator. Indeed, the Wrightsman bid had proven downright beneficial. The United Kingdom now owned the painting. A leading member of Parliament put out a statement thanking everyone in sight and exulting that “a great and historic picture should now become the property of the nation.”

  The National Gallery capitalized on the publicity surrounding the near loss of The Duke, putting the painting on special exhibit beginning on August 2. It hung alone on a portable easel in the North Vestibule, on brackets to enable instant removal in case of war or fire. With the recent auction and its aftermath having reinforced the sense of Goya’s portrait as a national treasure, the painting drew more than five thousand visitors daily. Nineteen days later, it vanished.

  Shocking though the theft was to England, it was just another in a string of major art thefts worldwide. The previous eighteen months had produced seven significant thefts in southern France alone. The latest, the pilfering of eight Cézannes totaling roughly $2 million from the Vendôme Pavilion in Aix-en-Provence, occurred just a few weeks before the taking of The Duke. In the week prior to that, on July 28, thieves made off with $1 million worth of art, including six Picassos, from famed Pittsburgh steel man and art collector G. David Thompson. In the wake of this rash of thefts, the media coined and bandied about a new term: paintnapping.

  Two weeks before the taking of The Duke of Wellington, Time magazine made a droll observation that would later take on special significance. Noting a few partially botched thefts that had damaged masterpieces, the magazine suggested that “stealing art is a branch of burglary suitable only to the most skilled criminal. . . . But with all the news of high prices at art auctions and of recent art burglaries all over, a lot of crooks of the wrong kind are getting into art theft.” Indeed, the possibility of inadvertent damage by sloppy thieves weighed on the custodians of culture. Concerned about the delicate condition of Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, National Gallery director Philip Hendy publicly appealed to the thief to “protect it from moisture and strong light.”

  Though art theft had become increasingly commonplace, to the British public, the taking of The Duke obviously merited special attention. The media gave it saturation coverage. “NO GOYA—NO CLUE” screamed the Daily Express headline. The Guardian explained why this theft was more noteworthy than the theft of the Berthe Morisot painting from the Tate just five years earlier. In the prior case, “the sensation was dampened by the fact that everyone believed it to be a political gesture. And so it turned out to be.”b Moreover, Goya’s Duke of Wellington was “valued at 10 times as much as the Morisot.” The day after the theft, the Times began its large cover story, “£140,000 GOYA VANISHES,” with characteristic sobriety: “Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington has disappeared from the National Gallery, it was announced yesterday.”

  The culprits were partisans in a long-standing dispute over a bequest. The will of Sir Hugh Percy Lane, who died in 1915, bequeathed his extensive art collection to the gallery, but a later codicil bequeathed it to the city of Dublin. The gallery held on to the works until 1959, when an agreement specified that it would lend half of the works to Dublin every five years.

  The Times reported that the painting was noticed missing a little before 11 P.M. but was initially thought “removed for a legitimate purpose, such as being photographed elsewhere in the building.” Once it was discerned that the painting had in fact been stolen, an intensive search of the gallery was followed by the calling in of Scotland Yard. In addition, “Interpol have been warned and ports and airports are being watched to prevent the picture from being smuggled out of the country.”

  The Times further noted that when the gallery opened at 10 A.M. the next morning, members of the public who inquired about the empty spot where they expected to see The Duke were told that the painting had been removed for conservation—which must have struck experienced museum-goers as odd, given that it had been put on special exhibition just three weeks earlier. It wasn’t until 3 P.M. that the public was notified of The Duke’s disappearance.

  A separate sidebar in the Times noted that 1961 had been a banner year for art thieves throughout Europe and North America and observed that “the wide distribution of the thefts might suggest that an international gang is at work.” This article further noted, “The motive for them seems obvious enough, namely the huge monetary value placed on works of art at present,” but “how and why they may be disposed of is more of a puzzle.” It closed by observing that “no doubt many thieves
count on being able to extract some form of ransom”—an observation that, before long, would prove prescient in the case of the missing Duke.

  The ensuing days witnessed extensive coverage and, on days when there was no news related to the theft, letters to the editor. On August 25, 26, and 28, the Times ran letters under the identical title, “The Missing Goya.” The August 25 letter criticized security at the National Gallery, with an emphasis on the missing painting going unreported for many hours. A letter to the editor published the next day praised the earlier letter for drawing attention to the weaknesses in gallery security and proposed a solution: Trustees, currently appointed by the Treasury “from the same small group of artists and connoisseurs,” should henceforth include some people with “practical experience of security in other fields.” A short letter two days later cautioned against quick fixes that would create a “false sense of security.” On August 31, the Times ran a piece that echoed the concerns cited by readers in their letters and called for an “independent inquiry” because “the nation’s art treasures are too precious for their safety to be left in the least doubt.”

  The issue of museum security became paramount. Eric Crowther, an attorney who later became involved in the case, recalled that the theft “had considerable repercussions, even worldwide.” Especially considering the earlier rash of thefts, museums felt nervous about security and underinsured. In Britain, Prime Minister Harold MacMillan’s government proposed a charge for museum admission to raise money for heightened security. The measure never took, but individual museums adopted other means of safeguarding their collections.

  Meanwhile, the theft produced a short-term benefit to the National Gallery. All the publicity led to a spike in visitors (from the usual August average of five thousand daily to more than seven thousand in the weeks following the theft), and reportedly even more people came to see the empty space where The Duke had hung than had come to see the painting itself.

  Chapter 2: TOM SAWYER MEETS OLIVER TWIST

  In the opening paragraph of his unpublished memoirs, Kempton Bunton observes, “I always went my own way regardless of the frowns and comments of others,” a self-judgment confirmed by history. On the other hand, not everything Bunton says in that opening paragraph is equally believable, starting with his promise to provide “the plain unvarnished facts” of his life. Even assuming Bunton could be trusted to give an entirely accurate autobiographical accounting (a tall order for anybody), plain and unvarnished are adjectives not applicable to the bizarre memoirs recounting his incredible life.

  Commentators have remarked on the nursery rhyme quality of his name, and Kempton Bunton himself observed in his memoirs that Kempton was “a strange name, and one which I have never come across again in my sixty odd years.” Apparently Bunton’s mother, fond of the racetrack, named her boy after an accomplished British jockey, Kempton Cannon, who, riding a horse she had wagered on, won the ballyhooed Epsom Derby just days before she gave birth to a son on June 14, 1904.

  The equine origin of his name apparently stuck with Bunton. Throughout his life, whenever asked how to spell or pronounce his unusual name, he would reply “Kempton, as in Kempton Park racecourse”—a well-known course in a western suburb of London. Bunton’s double association with horse racing is appropriate, given his dalliances with bookmaking and his eventual notoriety for an egregious gamble.

  In his memoirs, Bunton describes having a mother from “hardy working stock,” and primarily businessmen on his father’s side of the family. He recalls his paternal grandfather with particular fondness and vividness. He was a blacksmith who acquired substantial wealth through lucrative real estate deals but whose personality made more of an impression on Bunton: “a Rebel, often at war, defying the local Council over drains, boundaries, or what have you, and the curious part is that he too, would seemingly always lose.” He too? No other losers were referred to, leading one to conclude that the unnamed fellow loser in this passage is Bunton himself. The memoirs poignantly convey a man at war with the world and getting the worst of it.

  Bunton’s father, Harry, one of fifteen children, was a bookmaker, or “turf accountant,” who impregnated the housemaid, Dorothy Hudspith. In England in 1899, this must have been shocking on several levels. In the telling of the man whose birth would result from this impropriety, this “lurid happening” triggered the prompt sacking of Hudspith, “the only thing which could be done in that Victorian era.” But young Harry Bunton shocked everyone by declaring his love for and intention to marry the disgraced wench. So he did, and he was promptly fired from the family contracting business.

  Newly married, unemployed, and facing a tough economy, Harry joined the army. He was based in Aldershot, three hundred miles from the family home in Newcastle upon Tyne, a situation he found unfortunate and unfair. So he did the natural thing and walked the three hundred miles home. But the army scooped him back up, and the young man became reconciled to life in the military. Indeed, he soon found himself promoted to the cavalry, where he served in the Boer War—sans “medal or heroics,” according to his future son, “but no doubt of some help to the making of an empire.”

  When he returned from the war, Harry Bunton worked various jobs for modest wages and promptly squandered at the racetrack whatever disposable income he managed to attain. Though his wife’s street-corner business selling dead rabbits brought in a bit more cash, the Buntons struggled. They lived in a small house in Byker, a suburb of Newcastle. It is unclear whether they engaged in a shady activity Kempton Bunton claims was accepted in that time and place: “It was common practice for familys [sic] to run up arrears of many months, and then with the aid of a wheelbarrow, shift to another house a few hundred yards away, and start afresh leaving the landlord to sing for his back rent.”

  The family fortunes changed when Bunton was a year old, when his father launched his own business as a street bookmaker. From noon to two each afternoon he accepted bets, and he paid off winners at six that evening. Bunton notes that these transactions, while “illegal of course,” continued for some time, “mostly in favor of the booky [sic].” Harry Bunton accumulated sufficient cash to gain a reputation as “the millionaire of the district.” His newfound wealth attracted women, “which in turn attracted bitter feuds between his lawful wife and himself.”

  Actually bitter seems euphemistic. Kempton Bunton recalls his mother bopping his father over the head with a “heavy glass ornament” and Harry retaliating by slashing her dresses with “an old type of cut throat razor.” The unhappy couple stayed together, raising Kempton, his older brother (who would die from an abscess when Bunton was nine), and three sisters.

  Bunton’s teenage years combined the swashbuckling ne’er-do-well rebelliousness of Tom Sawyer with the hardscrabble privation of Oliver Twist. He received no formal education (“very few people worried about my schooling, least of all myself”) and starting at age twelve took on a dizzying array of jobs. His mother, whom he describes as “fat and aggressive,” somehow became owner of a tavern in Amble, thirty miles north of Newcastle, and put twelve-year-old Kempton to work as a bartender. Needless to say, this was a challenging assignment for a preteen, who on one occasion had to tell a pair of feisty seamen that neither beer nor whiskey was on tap. They accepted the only available alternative, brandy, and after substantial indulgence were literally fighting drunk. His mother returned from shopping just in time to avert a disaster, and she “gave me a lecture about serving spirits to young seamen.”

  Amble was site of the happiest memories of Bunton’s gritty childhood—“fishing, digging for sand worms, swimming back and forth across the harbor”—but he rarely fared well on the employment front. The boy bounced from odd job to odder job (bartender, shipyard digger, tea boy, tea maker, seaman, bookie, cook, auto mechanic, driver, and salesman), getting fired or quitting in each case, usually in the wake of some malfeasance by himself or others.

  He took these jobs less as a matter of financial necessity than because
his mother wished to keep him out of trouble, but the occupations repeatedly failed to achieve that goal. Not only did his employment invariably end in mishap, but Bunton managed to find time for mischief in the off hours. Indeed, Bunton as scofflaw is a recurring theme of his memoirs. He casually recounts “scallywagging around with a group of orchard raiders, sour apples are the coveted loot,” and “illegal sailings in the harbor with other people’s boats” as well as assisting his father’s illegal bookmaking operation, where crime begat crime: Harry Bunton routinely bribed the police to avoid a bust.

  This is all recounted somewhat self-effacingly and with the occasional burst of surprising literary flair. This uneducated man writes passages like the following apropos of his mother preventing him from getting on a steamship that ended up being torpedoed by the Germans: “Such are the fates in which we flitter, and who can call himself really lucky until he is dead?” The echo of Sophocles (“Count no man happy until he has passed his final day free from pain”) is perhaps even more impressive if it was inadvertent.

  Bunton’s frequent unself-conscious asides take on special meaning in light of his subsequent history. He writes, for example, that “a biography to be worth its salt, must deal with all sides of a person’s nature—everyone has at times done something which they ought not to have done, and even though the years may have covered up these ‘dark deeds’ in obscurity, it is only right they should come to light.” That observation comes in reference to his accepting a bet from a drunkard on a horse that paid off one hundred to one, with the winning ticket never claimed because the drunkard forgot he had made the bet. Despite presenting the story in confessional mode, Bunton says, “I never considered [not paying him] as a mean act,” because his father frequently gave the man free drinks, so he “received the money in bits.” Throughout his memoirs, he comes across as master in the art of rationalization.