Primavera

Primavera is Italian for spring, and Guercino shows the season as a young woman seated out of doors while plump infants bring her flowers and one holds a wreath above her head. The canvas is large, well over two metres tall, and the museum gives it no firm date. Its route into the collection is the odd part of the story. A Boston collector, George Gardner, gave the painting to the museum in 1919 but kept it hanging in his own house, where it stayed until the late 1930s. When he died in 1939, it went instead to Children's Hospital in Boston, with the museum's agreement. In 1986 the hospital sold it to the museum, and the picture first given in 1919 finally entered the collection, 67 years later.