Officer on Horseback

The museum lists this rider as the work of a follower of Goya, an unnamed painter working in his manner, and the canvas has no date. Its route to Boston is better known than its maker. It belonged to Louisine Havemeyer of New York, whose collection went largely to the Metropolitan Museum of Art after her death in 1929. This picture was not among the works the Metropolitan received. It was sold at auction in New York in April 1930, then passed through several dealers' hands and was owned for a time by a collector in Bradford, Pennsylvania. In 1939 the London and New York dealer Julius Weitzner exchanged it with the Museum of Fine Arts, which paid not in money but with pictures from the collection of Henry and Martha Angell, given to the museum some years before.