(From the Dulwich Gallery)
We should prefer to call this picture the Flower-seller, for the girl
is not really a beggar at all. Her clothes are worn with some approach
to nicety, and she carries roses that command a ready sale in Seville
if the seller be attractive and young. Murillo has given us a very
charming type of Spanish girl, and has obtained some striking colour
harmonies.
[Illustration: Plate II.--THE BEGGAR GIRL]
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To this day Andalusia is a country of dreamers, and Seville, despite
its electric trams and motor cars, its barracks and cosmopolitan
hostelries, is _par excellence_ the city of dreams. How much more so
then, three hundred years ago, when Murillo was born to enjoy its
beauty? In Seville wealth is a mere accident, even the poor may return
thanks without mental reservation for the nugatory gift of life. Faith
flourishes to-day in the agnostic generation as of old time, blended
with what we would regard as superstition, but sharing this fault with
all the Latin countries. In the Cathedral and the Caridad, to say
nothing of smaller religious houses, the pictures of Murillo still
remind us that to the Catholic religion the world owes the worship of a
woman. To Murillo, God and the Virgin were not pale abstractions; they
were his father and his mother, for he was hardly more than ten years
old when his earthly parents fell victims to one of the epidemics so
common in Europe in days when sanitation and isolation were not
understood.
For twenty years, the most impressionable of his life, Murillo lived
alone. Those who sneer at his work in these early times ignore the
conditions under which it was done, forget that the cost of canvas and
pigment was a very serious item in his exchequer, and that his reward
was of the smallest. Wealth never came his way until he was no longer
quite young, but as his circumstances became easier he did all that in
him lay to express his message more completely and, while his labour
was unremitting, his last work was his best, and included masterpieces
that may hold their own in any company, even though it include the
masters before whom artist and layman bow the head. Murillo has been
cheapened by forgers and copyists who have succeeded in placing many of
his shortcomings and very little of his quality on their hurried
canvases. Every picture dealer in a Spanish city of any pretensions
has a Murillo or two that he is prepared to vouch for even though the
canvas gives the lie to his protestations. The artist's work has been
used shamelessly for purposes of advertisement, it has paid the fullest
penalties of popularity, and yet, a real Murillo in the best manner is
a picture to which we can turn again and again, to find over and above
the conquest of technical difficulties and the beauties of colour the
qualities of imagination and inspiration that are associated with the
select few in every branch of creative work. One might go as far as to
say that Seville would lose as much as Madrid if the Murillos were
taken from the one and the Velazquez pictures from the other. There
would be no hesitation on the writer's part to say as much if the
capital of Andalusia had never been rifled of its proper store by the
French conquerors of Spain. It is not in foreign galleries that one
must go to see the work of a great artist, but in the city that was his
home--the city wherein the sources of his inspiration linger and his
pictures find an appropriate setting. Transplanting is not good for
anything. The trees and flowers, the birds and beasts of a foreign
land may endure in a clime for which they were not intended, but there
is no more than an arrested growth; they cannot do justice to
themselves. Frankly and without reserve we admit that Murillo was
almost as much an Andalusian as a painter, but when we know his city
and his work there, a fine picture in the National Gallery or the
Louvre will bring Seville back to us as surely as a sea-shell brings
back the ceaseless murmur of the waves.