Bartolome Esteban Murillo
Place Born
SevillePlace Died
SevilleBio
The most popular of Spanish artists in the latter part of the nineteenth century, particularly because of the appeal of his beautiful and sentimental Virgins, Murillo’s reputation suffered until relatively recently precisely because of a reaction against the very qualities admired in the Victorian era. Happily, modern scholarship and a succession of exhibitions of Spanish seventeenth century art have demonstrated that Murillo was far more complex, ranging from the moving Madrid Saint Jerome (Museo del Prado), through the realism of his portraits of street urchins (Paris, Louvre, London, Dulwich Gallery, Vienna, Academy, and Munich, Alte Pinakothek), the complex allegory of the senses in the Kimbell, the emotive portrayal of Saint Francis embracing the Crucified Christ (Seville, Museo de Bellas Artes) and a handful of austere portraits that he seeems to have painted through his life.
Murillo’s early career is well-documented. Born in Seville, where he spent the majority of his life, he studied first with a local artist, Juan del Castillo, and would have been familiar with the Venetian and Flemish paintings that could be seen in both ecclesiastical buildings and a handful of aristocratic collections. His artistic education proceeded with only limited exposure to concurrent artistic developements but, nonetheless, his extraordinary facility with the brush and technical skills brought him considerable success.