Bartolomé Esteban Murillo
The gentle painter of Seville.
Murillo painted Madonnas and street children with soft light and warmth. For a long time he was Spain's best-known painter abroad.
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo was baptised in Seville on 1 January 1618. He was the youngest of fourteen children and was orphaned at about the age of ten. He grew up with an elder sister and her husband. He was apprenticed to the painter Juan del Castillo and began by painting smaller, simple religious pictures, some of which were exported to the Spanish colonies in the Americas.
His breakthrough came in 1645–46, when he painted a series for the Franciscan monastery in Seville. In 1645 he married Beatriz Cabrera. They had many children, but several died young, and Beatriz died in 1663. Murillo soon became Seville's leading painter and took over Zurbarán's place with the monasteries. In the 1660s and 1670s he painted a large series on the Works of Mercy for the Hospital de la Caridad, where several of the paintings still hang. In 1660 he was one of the founders of an academy of art in Seville.
Murillo painted softly and warmly, with light colours and diffuse light. His many pictures of the Immaculate Conception show Mary floating among clouds and little angels. He also painted the street children of Seville, as in The Young Beggar in the Louvre and Boys Eating Grapes and Melon in Munich. They are poor and ragged but portrayed with warmth and humour, and the pictures were popular with foreign collectors. In The Holy Family with a Little Bird in the Prado the Christ Child plays with a dog, and Joseph is a caring father.
According to tradition he fell from a scaffold while working on an altarpiece in Cádiz. He died in Seville in 1682.
In the 18th and 19th centuries Murillo was one of the most famous painters in Europe, and many works were taken out of Spain, among others by Napoleon's marshal Soult. Later he was considered too sweet and sentimental, and his reputation declined. Today he is again seen as one of the great masters of the Spanish Golden Age.