Works by Francisco de Zurbarán

Francisco de Zurbarán painted monks, nuns and martyrs in Seville, often a single figure in hard light against a dark, bare ground, and he had a special hand for white cloth.

In 1614 his father sent him from Fuente de Cantos to Seville as an apprentice. A 1626 contract with the Dominicans of San Pablo el Real, for 21 paintings in eight months, made his name, and The Crucifixion of 1627 belongs to that cycle. Early writers said its lit body, hung in a dim room behind a grill, looked carved rather than painted.

He worked from life and studied folds on a lay figure; his gift for white drapery is why the white-robed Carthusians have many of his paintings. In The Venerable Miguel Gerónimo Carmelo the Latin words a friar speaks run from his open mouth to the tiny Virgin he sees in the corner. In Christ and the Virgin in the House at Nazareth, a subject he seems to have invented, the boy Jesus pricks a finger on the crown of thorns he is making. Saint Lucy wears flowers in her hair, a red bodice and pearls, and holds out a pewter plate with two eyes on it.

Religious subjects lead among the paintings below, many of them from the 1630s and brown in tone. One break from the saints is Hercules Fighting the Nemean Lion of 1634, where the naked hero locks his arms round the lion's neck. After 1640 his hard style fared badly beside Murillo's softer piety, and in 1658 he moved to Madrid to look for work; he died there in 1664.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art, Museo del Prado.