Kempton Bunton was an English man who confessed to taking Francisco Goya's painting Portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London in 1961.
14 Facts About Kempton Bunton
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Kempton Bunton had plans to take it to the United States.
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The move was reported to have enraged Kempton Bunton who objected to the television licence fee, considering that television should be made available to everybody who needed it.
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Kempton Bunton had campaigned for free television licences for pensioners and had been imprisoned several times for refusing to pay for a licence.
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Kempton Bunton claimed that on the early morning of 21 August 1961 he had loosened a window in a toilet and entered the gallery.
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Kempton Bunton further claimed that he had then prised the framed painting from the display and escaped via the window.
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In 1965, four years after the theft, Kempton Bunton contacted a newspaper and, through a left-luggage office at Birmingham New Street railway station, returned the painting voluntarily.
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Kempton Bunton was sentenced to and served three months in prison.
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John Kempton Bunton said that his father had intended to use the painting as part of his campaign and that it would ultimately have been returned to the National Gallery.
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Kempton Bunton said that both he and his brother, Kenneth, had been ordered by their father not to come forward despite the trial.
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Kempton Bunton himself died in Newcastle upon Tyne in April 1976, aged 71.
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Kempton Bunton's death went largely unreported and there were no obituaries in the major newspapers.
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Kempton Bunton's purported theft and the disappearance of the Goya work entered popular culture.
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The story of the theft and the subsequent trial of Kempton Bunton was dramatised in the film The Duke, starring Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren, which premiered in UK cinemas on 25 February 2022.