Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo
Self-portrait, c. 1670–1673 (detail), National Gallery, London
Born	Late December 1617; baptised 1 January 1618 Seville, Crown of Castile
Died	3 April 1682 (aged 64) Seville, Crown of Castile
Known for	Painting, drawing
Movement	Spanish Baroque
Signature

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (/mjʊəˈrɪloʊ, m(j)ʊˈriːoʊ/ mure-IL-oh, m(y)uu-REE-oh, Spanish: [baɾtoloˈme esˈteβam muˈɾiʎo]; late December 1617, baptised 1 January 1618 – 3 April 1682) 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 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.

Childhood

Murillo was probably born in December 1617 to Gaspar Esteban, an accomplished barber surgeon, and María Pérez Murillo. He may have been born in Seville or in Pilas, a smaller Andalusian town. It is clear that he was baptized in Santa Maria Magdalena, a parish in Seville in 1618. After his parents died in 1627 and 1628, he became a ward of his older sister Ana and her husband, Juan Agustín Lagares, who coincidentally also happened to be a barber. Murillo seemed to have remained close to the couple considering he did not leave their house until his marriage in 1645. Eleven years later, he was named the executor of Lagares' will despite his sister having already died. Murillo seldom used his father's surname, and instead took his surname from his maternal grandmother, Elvira Murillo.

Early life and formative years

There are few documents on the early years of Murillo's life or on his origins as a painter. In 1633, at 15, Murillo received a license for passage to America with his family. He probably began his artistic career, either during those years or slightly beforehand. Murillo began his art studies in Seville in the workshop of Juan del Castillo, Murillo's uncle and godfather, as well a skilled painter in his own right. Castillo was characterized by the dryness of his sketches and the loving expressions in the subjects he painted, and Murillo took much of this as inspiration in his early work. His first works were also influenced by Francisco de Zurbarán, Jusepe de Ribera and Alonso Cano, and he shared their strongly realist approach. The great commercial importance of Seville at the time ensured that he was subject to artistic influences from other regions. He became familiar with Flemish painting and the "Treatise on Sacred Images" of Molanus (Ian van der Meulen or Molano). As his painting developed, his more important works evolved towards the polished style that suited the bourgeois and aristocratic tastes of the time, demonstrated especially in his Roman Catholic religious works.

According to fellow painter and art historian Antonio Palomino, Murillo left Castillo's workshop after feeling he had grown sufficiently skilled in his painting. In 1642, at the age of 26, he allegedly traveled to Madrid, where he most likely became familiar with the work of Velázquez, and saw the work of Francisco de Palacios; the rich colors and softly modeled forms of his subsequent work suggest these influences. While it is likely that, like many Sevillian painters, Murillo took inspiration from religious images in an attempt to attract the lucrative American market, there is actually little evidence of Murillo traveling to Madrid. Similar claims, attributed by Joachim von Sandrart, a German historian of the time, argue that Murillo also travelled to Italy during the same period. Palomino denies these assertions, arguing that they stem from a refusal of foreigners to acknowledge that Murillo's success had come from Spain, and Spain alone.

Palomino, instead, argued that Murillo's skill came from hours spent in his room, studying the natural world. He would use these skills when painting for the public, for the Franciscan convents throughout Spain, and for his fellow painters, who until then had little knowledge of his existence or art. In either case, his style could easily have been learned without leaving Seville from its previous generation of artists, such as Francisco de Zurbarán or Francisco de Herrera the Elder.

Career

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.

One of Murillo's late devotional paintings is the Madonna and Child, also known as the Nursing Madonna or Gypsy Madonna, dated c. 1675–1679 and held by the Galleria Corsini in Rome. In 1877 the Italian engraver Francesco Di Bartolo was commissioned by the Regia Calcografia to prepare a charcoal drawing after the painting, on condition that he would also be entrusted with the engraving. The drawing was approved in 1878, and the burin engraving was completed and published in Rome in 1882. The work documents the 19th-century reception of Murillo in Italy through official reproductive engraving.

Murillo 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.

Legacy

Murillo had many pupils and followers. The prolific imitation of his paintings ensured his reputation in Spain and fame throughout Europe, and before the 19th century his work was more widely known than that of any other Spanish artist. Artists influenced by his style included Gainsborough and Greuze. Google marked the 400 years since Murillo's birth with a doodle on 29 November 2018.

Public collections

The Museo del Prado in Madrid; Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia (such as Boy with a Dog); and the Wallace Collection in London are among the museums holding works by Murillo. His painting "The Coronation in Heaven of the Mother of God" is on display at the Basilica of St. Joseph Proto-Cathedral in Bardstown Kentucky. His painting Christ on the Cross is at the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego. Christ After the Flagellation is at the Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, Illinois. His work is also found at the Mabee-Gerrer Museum of Art in Shawnee, Oklahoma, and at the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. The National Gallery of Ireland holds a series of six paintings by Murillo depicting the parable of the prodigal son.

From the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo — Spanish painter; b. at Seville, 31 December, 1617; d. there 5 April, 1682. His family surname was Esteban; that of Murillo, which he assumed in accordance with an Andalusian custom, was his mother's. His father was an artisan. An orphan at the age of ten, Bartolomé was brought up by his uncle, J.A. Lagarès, a barber. He became the pupil, probably while still very young, of Juan del Castillo, a mediocre painter, but good teacher, whose atelier was at that time much frequented. It is said that, to gain a living, the young man in those days made sargas -- cheap paintings on rough canvas sold at country ferias (fairs), and shipped to America by traders. The Museum of Cadiz claims, but without proof, that one of these Murillo sargas is in its possession. In 1640 Castillo went to live at Cadiz. In the meantime, Moya, having just arrived from England, where he had been Van Dyck's pupil, showed Murillo, who was an old friend of his, the cartoons, drawings, copies, and engravings he had brought with him. Murillo set out on a journey to study the great masters, but went no farther than Madrid. Velasquez, the king's painter and the friend of Olivares, was himself a native of Seville; he welcomed his young compatriot and gave him the entrée to all the royal galleries, where Murillo saw the masterpieces of Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, and Rubens, not to mention Velasquez himself. He spent three years here, and this was all his travel. He returned to Seville in 1644. After this he left Seville but once, in 1681, when he went to Cadiz to paint an altar for the Capuchins which he never had the time to finish. A fall from his scaffolding or else a serious illness -- accounts differ -- forced him to let himself be taken back, hurriedly, to Seville, where he died after a brief period of suffering.

Religious painting and realism

His was a very pure life, and perfectly happy, all spent within that one Sevillian horizon which the artist never wished to change for any other. His paintings in the portería of the Minims made a celebrity of him at the age of twenty-eight (1646). From that time he devoted himself to work on a large scale for the convents of his native Seville, work which, in some respects, recalls the Giottesque paintings of the fourteenth century. In contrast with Velasquez and the Madrid school, Murillo is wholly a religious painter. With the exception of a few portraits and some genre pieces, not one profane picture of his is known to exist. The product of his life's work is summed up in the great cycles of Santa Maria la Blanca (1665), of the Caridad Hospital (1670-74), of the Capuchins (1676), of the Venerables Sacerdotes (1678), of the Augustinians (1680), and, lastly, of the Cadiz Capuchins, together with a large number of pictures made at different times for the cathedral of Seville or other churches and many devotional works for private individuals. Murillo was the national painter of a country where all sentiment was still merged in the one sentiment of religion. The critics have distinguished three periods, or manners, in his work: the cold, the hot, and the "vaporous ". The classification is foolish and pedantic. It is enough to look at his "Angels' Kitchen" (1646), his "Birth of the Virgin" (1655), and his "Holy Family" (1670), all in the Louvre: here we can see nothing but the natural evolution of a talent which from first to last pursued but one ideal -- the poetical transfiguration of facts and ideas.

This ideal is already fully perceptible in the first of the examples cited, or in the "Death of St. Clare" (Dresden Museum), which also belongs to the portería series. In the "Angels' Kitchen", as in many others of his paintings, the artist's problem is to combine the supernatural with the real and familiar. Here we have a holy Franciscan in ecstasy, lifted from the ground, while angels with shining wings attend to the service of the refectory and wash the pans; and lastly, some spectators are peeping through a half-open door. The whole scene is displayed with admirable clearness, without a suggestion of hiatus between the three parts which are so diverse in character.

From this period date those few genre paintings which may be regarded as exceptional works of Murillo, the most famous example being the "Pouilleux" of the Louvre. Like every great Spanish painter, Murillo is a realist, and goes as far as anyone in the pathetic painting of suffering. But he refuses to paint these horrors with the frightful dilettantism, the cold, cruel detachment, of other Spanish artists. For him, pain and misery are objects of pity, not of curiosity or pleasure. AIone of the great painters of his race, his genius is tender, affectionate. Murillo's realism, however exact and sound, is never altogether impersonal or objective. In spite of himself, he communicates, together with the record of the reality, the emotions which it produces in himself; he does not alter its form, but he adds to it something of his own. In Spain, the classic land of brutal observation, of the "slice taken from life" served up raw and bleeding, Murillo invents, combines, achieves compositions. He has an imagination, and he does not make a point of honour of ignoring it. With more than average gifts for portraiture -- as witness his portrait of Padre Cabanillas, at Madrid, or the admirable figure in the Museum of the Hispanic Society in New York -- he made very few portraits. On the other hand, he has the gift and the instinct for story-telling. The Italian sense of fine arrangement, of a happy symmetry and harmonious balance of grouping, as in his Holy Families, in the Louvre, is a quality which he alone seems to have possessed in his age.

Gospel sentiment and the Immaculate Conception

Murillo was a great painter of sentiment. Like Rembrandt, he understood that the true language of the Gospel was the language of the people. Like him, he especially delighted in the merciful and tender aspects of the Gospel. Nothing can be more touching than the "Prodigal Son" of the Hermitage -- not even Rembrandt's treatment of that subject -- or his sketches on the same parable in the Prado. Like Rembrandt, he loves to bring the sacred truths near to us, to make us see them as intimate and familiar realities, to show us the Divine all about us in our lives. Murillo, no doubt, has the defects of these qualities. He never suffered enough. His optimism, his bonhomie, his grace, lack the seriousness that trials should have imparted. His serene smile lacks that intangible quality of having been through sorrow. Failing this experience, the soul tends somewhat to levity and to preciosity.

His pre-eminence as, superlatively, the painter of the Immaculate Conception seems to have been foreshadowed in the circumstances of his birth. At Seville, in 1617, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was solemnly promulgated for Spain; and this splendid celebration took place in Murillo's native city only a few months before his birth. The pictorial treatment of the subject had long been determined, in its main outlines, by a vision said to have been vouchsafed to a Franciscan of the sixteenth century, and a hundred examples of it are found among earlier painters. The mere theological dogma of the Immaculate Conception -- exemption from the original taint -- necessarily eluded all material representation: the equivalent chosen was the theme of the Assumption. The body is seen exempt from all the laws of gravitation. Murillo has treated this theme more than twenty times, without repeating himself or ever wearying: six versions at Madrid, six others at Seville, the famous Louvre picture (dated 1678), and still others scattered over Europe -- all these did not exhaust the painter's enthusiasm or his power of expressing apotheosis.

It is a remarkable fact that these pictures, which represent the most transcendently spiritual action, are the most thoroughly feminine paintings in Spain. But for religious representations of the Blessed Virgin and the saints, indeed, woman is almost absent from Spanish painting. The most famous portraits of women, the infantas or meninas of Velasquez, retain nothing of feminine charm: they are simulacra and phantoms without verisimilitude. Side by side with these apparitions, Murillo's Virgins produce a comforting effect of relief. Here are women, true and vital, with the most thoroughly external charms of their sex. In them the impulse of love rises to ecstasy, and without Murillo Spanish painting would be deprived of its most beautiful love poems. Many persons, it is true, see in this style of painting the symptoms of decadence in Spanish religious sentiment. This question of the soundness or unsoundness of his devotional tendencies cannot be treated here, but it may at least be claimed for Murillo that his art -- notably in these Immaculate Conceptions -- is no less genuinely religious than the dry productions of, say, a Philippe de Champaigne.

PALOMINO, Noticias, Elogios y Vidas de los Pintores (Madrid, 1715-24); CEAN BERMUDEZ, Diccionario histórico de los más ilustres profesores (Madrid, 1800); VIARDOT, Notices sur les principaux peintres de l'Espagne (Paris, 1839); PASSAVANT, Die christliche Kunst in Spanien (Leipzig, 1853); TUBINO, Murillo, su época, su vida, sus cuadros (Seville, 1864); CURTIS, Velasquez and Murillo (London, 1883); JUSTI, Murillo (Leipzig, 1892); KNACKFUSS, Murillo (Leipzig, 1897); CALVAERT, Murillo (London, 1908).

Further reading

• Di Bartolo, Natalia, Foundational corpus and corpus of essays for the bicentenary of the birth of Francesco Di Bartolo (1826–1913), engraver and painter, OperaeOpera, 2026.
• Palomino, Antonio (1988). El museo pictórico y escala óptica III. El parnaso español pintoresco laureado. Madrid: Aguilar S.A. de Ediciones. ISBN 84-03-88005-7.
• Murillo's painting The Spanish Page is the subject of an ekphrastic poem by Letitia Elizabeth Landon in Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1837. See The Spanish Page.
• Rossetti, William Michael (1911). "Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 19 (11th ed.). pp. 35–37.
• Xavier F. Salomon and Letizia Treves, Murillo: The Self-Portraits. New York: The Frick Collection, 2017. Accompanied exhibition

External links

• 100 artworks by or after Bartolomé Esteban Murillo at the Art UK site
• Scholarly articles in English about Bartolomé Esteban Murillo both in web and PDF @ the Spanish Old Masters Gallery
• Paintings in Museums and Public Art Galleries Worldwide
• Murillo Biography, Style and Critical Reception
• Murillo Gallery at MuseumSyndicate
• Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Bartolomé Esteban Murillo". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
• Murillo at ArtRenewalCenter
• The Madonna and Child., engraved by Robert Graves for The Easter Gift, 1832, with a verse by Letitia Elizabeth Landon