By far the best represented of all the masters at the Spanish school is
Bartolomé Estéban Murillo (1618?-1682). He was born at Seville, of poor
parents, and studied as a boy under Juan del Castillo. Forced before he
had reached manhood to gain his livelihood, he took to manufacturing
artistically worthless devotional pictures on saga-cloth, for sale at
the weekly fairs in the poor quarter of Seville. This early practice
of rather mechanical production, and the habit, acquired by necessity,
of working to please the public, clung to him in after life and are
responsible for much that the modern mind finds distasteful in his
art—a certain sickly sentimentality that often takes the place of real
sentiment, and an artificiality of arrangement even where the types are
realistic renderings of the people among whom he spent his days.
With his small savings from the proceeds of his crude popular pictures
Murillo proceeded to Madrid, where Velazquez assisted him by deed,
advice, and example, though the two artists were probably never in the
relation of master and pupil. After about two years thus profitably
spent at Madrid, Murillo returned to Seville, where he continued to
work until his death in 1682, and rose to the very summit of fame and
popularity. At his best Murillo was a colourist of great charm and a
technician of the rarest skill. His art is most admirable where he
adheres most closely to the realistic tradition of his country. It
is scarcely to be credited that the same hand which produced so many
vaporous and vapid Madonnas is responsible for a picture painted with
such superb breadth and incisive vigour as _The Young Beggar_ (No.
1717), which is almost worthy of the brush of Velazquez in his Sevillan
period. The decidedly unsavoury subject is made acceptable by the
consummate artistry of the treatment.
“THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION”
It is not, however, to pictures of this type that Murillo owed his
widespread popularity. Generations of enthusiastic admirers have
stood in silent awe before his large painting of _The Immaculate
Conception_ (No. 1709, Plate XXVI.), which is certainly one of the best
of innumerable versions of the same subject—the Virgin standing on a
crescent moon, with ecstatic gaze, and hands pressed to her breast,
and surrounded by swarms of joyous angel-children—painted by Murillo
to meet an apparently insatiable demand. There is something of real
ecstasy in this conception. To find a similar _morbidezza_ of pigment
one must turn to certain famous works by Andrea del Sarto: it is a
quality which is generally conspicuously absent from Spanish painting
and which, if carried a step farther, as it sometimes was carried by
Murillo, would result in fuzzy vapidness. This famous picture has the
distinction of being the most costly purchase ever made for the Louvre,
the price paid for it at the Marshal Soult sale in 1852—that is
many years before American competition had established the vastly
enhanced standards of value which now prevail—being as much as 615,300
fr., or £24,612.
[Illustration:
PLATE XXVI.—MURILLO
(1618?-1682)