_Murillo_ (Spanish: 1618-1682).
Bartolomé Estéban Murillo, the most widely popular of the
Spanish painters, was himself sprung from the "people." He was
born of humble parents in Seville, and his earliest attempts
at art were pictures for fairs. He is also believed to have
supplied some of the Madonnas which were shipped off by loads
for the convents in Mexico[51] and Peru. A turning-point in
his artistic career came, however, when a certain Pedro de
Moya came into the studio of Murillo's uncle, Castillo. De
Moya had been studying under Van Dyck in London. Van Dyck's
style was a revelation to Murillo, who determined forthwith to
start off on the grand tour. First, however, he went to Madrid,
where Velazquez helped him greatly. His studies there were
so successful, and his popularity became so great, that the
foreign journey was abandoned. He married a lady of fortune,
his house became a centre of taste and fashion, commissions
poured in upon him, and in 1660 he formed the Academy of
Seville. His life was as pious as it was busy. He was often
seen praying for long hours in his parish church, and in his
last illness (which was brought on by his falling, in a fit of
absence of mind, from a scaffold) he was carried every day to
pray before Pedro Campaña's "Descent from the Cross." "I wait
here," he said to the sacristan who asked one day if he were
ready to go, "till the pious servants of our Lord have taken
him down."
Murillo was thus one of the last sincerely religious
painters--a class which, "after a few pale rays of fading
sanctity from Guido, and brown gleams of gipsy Madonnahood
from Murillo, came utterly to an end" (_Modern Painters_, vol.
v. pt. ix. ch. iv. § 4). But it was "_gipsy_ Madonnahood":
there is an entire want of elevation in his religious types,
and the peasants whom he painted as beggars or flower-girls
he painted also as angels or Virgins. This mingling of the
common with the religious alike in subject and treatment was
no doubt a principal reason of his great popularity in his own
country.[52] His vulgarity of treatment in his favourite beggar
subjects is best seen in the Dulwich Gallery; of his religious
style, the pictures here are characteristic examples. There is
a certain "sweetness" and sentimentality about them which often
makes them immensely popular. The French in particular are
subject to a _furore_ for Murillo, his "Immaculate Conception,"
now in the Louvre, having been bought in 1852 for £23,440--the
largest sum ever given up to that time for a single
picture.[53] With children, too, Murillo is nearly always a
great favourite. A maturer taste, however, finds the sentiment
of Murillo overcharged, and the sweetness of expression an
insufficient substitute for elevation of character. "His
drawing," says Ruskin, "is free and not ungraceful, but most
imperfect and slurred to give a melting quality of colour. That
colour is agreeable because it has no force or severity; but
it is morbid, sunless, and untrue. His expression is sweet,
but shallow; his models amiable, but vulgar and mindless; his
chiaroscuro commonplace, opaque, and conventional; and yet all
this is so agreeably combined, and animated by a species of
wax-work life, that it is sure to catch everybody who has not
either very high feeling or strong love of truth, and to keep
them from obtaining either" (Letter to Dean Liddell, given in
the _Memoir_ by H. L. Thompson, p, 224.)[54] "Murillo," says
a more appreciative critic, "who assimilated least of foreign
elements, had become the most international of all Spanish
painters; for he possessed the art of winning the favour of
all, the gift of a language intelligible to all times and
peoples, to all classes and even to aliens of his faith"
(Justi: _Velazquez and his Times_, p. 236). One charm his
pictures have which no criticism is likely to take away: they
are all stamped with the artist's individuality; there is never
any mistaking a Murillo.
This picture--known as the Pedroso Murillo, from the Pedroso family,
in whose possession it remained until 1810--is one of the painter's
last works, painted when he was about sixty. The look of childlike
innocence in the head of the young Christ is very attractive, although
the attitude is undeniably "stagey." The heads of the Virgin and St.
Joseph also are good instances of Murillo's plan of "supplying the
place of intrinsic elevation by a dramatic exhibition of sentiment"
(W. B. Scott). The picture is characteristic of what is known as
Murillo's third, or _vaporoso_, manner. His first manner is called
_frio_, or cold; his second warm, or _calido_, and the third, from its
melting softness, _vaporoso_. The first style is generally spoken of
as lasting up to 1648, the second up to 1656, but he did not so much
paint in these different manners at different times as adapt them to
the different subjects severally in hand.