Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo was a Spanish Baroque painter. Although he is best known for his religious works, Murillo also produced a considerable number of paintings of contemporary women and children. These lively realistic portraits of flower girls, street urchins, and beggars constitute an extensive and appealing record of the everyday life of his times. He also painted two self-portraits, one in the Frick Collection portraying him in his 30s, and one in London's National Gallery portraying him about 20 years later. In 2017-18, the two museums held an exhibition of them.

In 1645, he returned to Seville and married Beatriz Cabrera y Villalobos, with whom he eventually had ten children. Of these children, only five outlived their mother, and only one, Gabriel (1655-1700) later carried on the work of Bartolome as a painter. The year of his marriage, Murillo received the first major commission of his career. This was to paint eleven canvases for the convent of San Francisco in Seville. He worked on this project from 1645 until 1648. These works depicted various stories of Franciscan saints which were not often told at the time. When selecting subjects, Murillo placed an emphasis on praising lives of contemplation and prayer as represented in paintings like Saint Francis Comforted by an Angel. His works vary between the Zurbaránesque tenebrism of the Ecstasy of St Francis and a softly luminous style (as in Death of St Clare) that became typical of Murillo's mature work. According to the art historian Manuela B. Mena Marqués, "in... the Levitation of St Giles (usually known as The Angels' Kitchen) and the Death of St Clare (Dresden, Gemäldegal. Alte Meister), the characteristic elements of Murillo's work are already evident: the elegance and beauty of the female figures and the angels, the realism of the still-life details and the fusion of reality with the spiritual world, which is extraordinarily well developed in some of the compositions." Similarly in Saint Diego Giving Alms, Murillo carefully places the subjects on parallel planes over black background, and its center, surrounding a boiling pot, are a group of children seemingly bathed in a heavenly glow. In doing so, Murillo managed to combine both tenebrism and luminosity to showcase the glory of aiding the needy and the innocent.

Also completed c. 1645 was the first of Murillo's many paintings of children, The Young Beggar (Musée du Louvre), in which the influence of Velázquez is apparent. Following the completion of a pair of pictures for the Seville Cathedral, he began to specialize in the themes that brought him his greatest successes: the Virgin and Child and the Immaculate Conception.

After another period in Madrid, from 1658 to 1660, he returned to Seville. Here he was one of the founders of the Academia de Bellas Artes (Academy of Art), sharing its direction, in 1660, with the architect Francisco Herrera the Younger. This was his period of greatest activity, and he received numerous important commissions, among them the altarpieces for the Augustinian monastery, the paintings for Santa María la Blanca (completed in 1665), and others. He died in Seville in 1682, a few months after he fell from a scaffold while working on a fresco at the church of the Capuchines in Cádiz.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2024