The Stolen Kiss

When Benjamin West signed this canvas in 1819, he was 80 and had been president of the Royal Academy in London for most of the past three decades. The king who had made his career, George III, was by then blind and insane, shut away at Windsor. George III died in January 1820. West died two months later.

The picture shows a young man stealing a kiss from a young woman who lies back in his arms holding up a garland of flowers, while other young women look on from the right. It is a large canvas, more than one and a half metres wide, and West never sold it. It was still among his pictures in May 1829, when his sons put them up for auction in London, and it went as lot 155.

By 1913 it belonged to George Robert White, a Boston businessman, who lent it to the Museum of Fine Arts that year. His sister Harriet Bradbury left it to the museum in 1930.