(From the Dulwich Gallery)
The little gallery near Dulwich College, some five miles away from the
boundaries of the City of London, is rich in works by Murillo. This
study of a beggar boy possesses more than the interest created by the
artist's clever treatment of shadow and light, the happiness of the
posing and the skilled brushwork. It reveals the truth that between
the beggar of nigh three hundred years ago and to-day there is little
or no difference in Spain. You may meet this child to-day in and round
the Andalusian country the painter knew so well.
[Illustration: PLATE V.--THE BEGGAR BOY]
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The painter's studio was now thronged with the _élite_ of Seville, by
the crowds that muster when genius has been acclaimed by responsible
parties and they need have no fear of their own taste. The man who had
painted _pinturas de la feria_ only three years ago could now choose
his own commissions. He made the best use of his opportunities, and, a
couple of years after his work for the Franciscans had given him a
start in life, he married Dona Beatrice de Cabrera y Sotomayor. A
portrait by Murillo said to be of the lady, is in the collection of Sir
J. Stirling-Maxwell, but, seen through the medium of a photograph, it
does nothing to explain why the painter married her. Perhaps the facts
that she was of noble family, and had wealth, may be trusted to provide
the key. Her flatterers could hardly have said that she was
attractive. In the picture she wears a mantilla, and a flower in her
hair after the fashion of the Sevillana, and looks as though she seldom
suffered from good temper, but if the portrait does stand for the
painter's wife, it is only fair to add that we have no record to
suggest that she was as difficult as she appears here. The suggestion
that one of his later portraits of a really attractive woman represents
his mistress is not supported sufficiently to convince us.
Down to the year of his return to Seville the painter's work is of
small importance, and in all probability the most of it has been lost.
In a country where the wealthy were better prepared to buy pictures
than to attach any importance to those who painted them, it is hardly
likely that the rough immature efforts of the painter who sought his
patrons at the weekly Fair would command attention. Critics of Murillo
divide his works into three periods, the first dating from 1646 to
1652, when his outlines were hard and the background lacked depth, and
the colouring was more or less metallic. Following this came a short
period of transition lasting till 1656, when more of the individuality
behind the brush becomes expressed on the canvas, and one does not see
the joints in the composition, or the definite effects by which the
colour scheme has been secured. From 1656 Murillo may be said to have
entered into his kingdom, to have expressed his conception of Holy
Family and saints as they occurred to his mind, to stand outside the
conventions that had fettered him hitherto. Some hold that these
changes were merely the result of constant study, but the writer
inclines to a strong belief that they were more than the fruit of mere
technical efficiency. The painter was turning more and more from
things of earth, to what he held to be things of Heaven, his emotional
nature was responsive to the ceremonial of the Church, and to the lives
of its worthiest representatives. Nearly all his work was done,
whether directly or indirectly, in the service of the Faith, and he
learned devoutly to believe in the miracles he was asked to express on
canvas. Then it was that he sought to represent female forms of simple
but enduring beauty, making luminous the surrounding air, angels
hovering over saints, little cherubs, whose feet had never touched our
own hard earth, smiling from folds of the Madonna's robes.
Unconsciously, perhaps, he was doing as the Florentine and Venetian
painters of the Renaissance had done before him; he was studying the
motherhood and childhood in the streets around him, and transferring it
with sure touch and reverent hand to his canvas. Small wonder then
that his work in the latter days went home more directly than ever to
the people among whom he lived, and that they looked upon Murillo as
they looked upon the Cathedral, or the Giralda Tower, as a monument to
their city and an instruction to strangers. To this day in the ancient
city if you would praise a work of art of any description, you say it
is a Murillo, _i.e._ a masterpiece. Perhaps the source of the
painter's struggle gives us also the key-note to his weakness. The
Church gave him faith and commissions, but it also imposed upon him a
certain stilted handling of his subjects. His angels and cherubs came
from the streets around his home, and sometimes one feels that they are
a little tired, a little intolerant of the pose he has inflicted upon
them, and are anxious to return to less unnatural surroundings. For
all his facility he had no daring; he felt and uttered the restrictions
that the Church imposed. Do not let us blame him for this, we should
rather remember his achievement in humanising the heavenly host than
his failure to make it human without self-consciousness. Only a wider
training and a deeper knowledge in many directions could have freed his
brush, but had it been too free, he would have found his occupation
gone. There must have been zealous churchmen who looked askance at
many of his pictures, for the bulk of these clerics could hardly have
looked at art save through the narrowing glasses of theology. To
estimate the debt that Spanish art owes to Murillo, let us look at the
representation of the subjects he made his own by any of the men who
preceded him.
Although Murillo was so largely concerned with sacred art and religious
feeling that his pictures for religious houses are largely in excess of
all others, he took an intelligent interest in the social and artistic
life around him. His home became one of the centres of intellectual
communion in a city that has never devoted itself altogether to affairs
of the mind, and he associated with the heads of Sevillian society in
and out of the Church. The old lean years were far behind him, his
pictures commanded the highest prices in the city, and were in demand
beyond its boundaries, though it is extremely unlikely that he left
Seville for long at any time. He may have gone as far as Cadiz, before
he went to his death there, but that would have been the extreme limit
of his excursions. Now and again by way of relaxation he painted a
landscape--there are one or two in Madrid which have not yet been
explained away by critics--and he painted portraits from time to time,
though he preferred to give to some saint the features he was asked to
record. Doubtless he felt that the Church had the first and final
claims upon his services, and that he had no right to devote his time
to secular subjects.
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