Works by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo
116 works · 126 ms
Softly glowing Virgins and Immaculate Conceptions made the name of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, but he also painted the street children, flower girls and beggars of his own day.
Murillo trained in Seville with his uncle and godfather, Juan del Castillo, and his first pictures share the hard realism of Francisco de Zurbarán and Jusepe de Ribera. A thinly documented story puts him in Madrid in 1642, getting to know the work of Diego Velázquez. His religious painting moved from Zurbarán's deep shadows towards the soft, luminous manner of his mature years.
After a pair of pictures for Seville Cathedral he focused on the two themes that won him most success, the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin with the Christ Child. In The Immaculate Conception of Los Venerables the Virgin stands on a crescent moon, rising through a golden haze full of infant angels. His drawings are rare; Madonna Nursing the Christ Child, in pen and wash, is a study for the Virgin and Child in New York, where the child who looks up at his mother in the drawing turns to face us instead.
Velázquez's influence shows in The Young Beggar of about 1645, the first of his many paintings of children, and children turn up often below. In Grape and Melon Eaters two barefoot boys in torn clothes sit by a fruit basket, one lowering grapes into his mouth while the other cuts a melon. In Two Women at a Window a girl leans on the sill with her chin on her fist, and an older woman behind the shutter hides her mouth in her shawl.
Sources: Wikipedia, Museo del Prado, National Gallery of Art, Bavarian State Painting Collections, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art.
