The Three Graces

In 1884 the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, open for only eight years, paid 650 dollars for this canvas from the collection of James E. Freeman, an American painter who had lived in Rome for decades and died there that year. Its figures come from Raphael's frescoes in the Villa Farnesina in Rome, where the vault of a garden loggia tells the story of Cupid and Psyche and one corner shows Cupid with the Three Graces.

American museums of the time still bought copies alongside plaster casts, so that visitors could see famous compositions they might never travel to Europe for. The Boston canvas is almost 2.7 metres tall and is not currently on view.