(From National Gallery, London)
When Murillo was not concerned with Virgin, Saints or Martyrs, he loved
to turn to the picturesque types of childhood that he found in the
streets around him. He has undoubtedly brought more character, more
humanity, and above all more movement into his child-life studies than
into his sacred pictures. The National Gallery is the fortunate
possessor of one of the painter's most successful studies of children,
reproduced here.
[Illustration: PLATE VI.--A BOY DRINKING]
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As his social influence and his opportunity for intercourse with
leading contemporaries increased, he entertained the idea of
establishing in Seville a Public Academy of Art. In pursuit of this
idea he would have received the hearty encouragement of the ecclesiasts
who looked upon art as a sure aid to devotion, and it may be that their
assistance contributed largely to the success of the inaugural meeting
held in Seville in the beginning of the year 1660, when a score or more
of the leading painters of Andalusia drew up the constitution of the
new body, and elected Murillo and the younger Herrera as joint
Presidents. Students were to be admitted on payment of what they could
afford, and the suggestion that the Church was supporting the new
venture is justified by the fact that every student was required to
abjure profanity and profess his orthodoxy by reciting an established
formula. The Presidents devoted a week in turn to the Academy,
teaching, criticising, and advising, and the struggling young artists
of the city and its environs made haste to avail themselves of the
chance of securing tuition and assistance. Herrera did not remain
constant to his self-imposed task, and doubtless Murillo found it
irksome, but the Academy was to no small extent the creation of his own
brain, and he did his best for it, taking up the burden that his fellow
president had laid aside. It is clear that he must have possessed some
talent for organisation and administration; the Academy seems to have
thrived as long as he was able to direct its affairs, but shortly after
his death its doors were closed. Some of the Spanish writers who have
had access to old papers and correspondence declare that Murillo's
position was one of great difficulty from the first, that the jealousy
of men who were older and less successful than he hampered him very
considerably, and that many of his best intentioned efforts were
thwarted. It is not difficult to understand that the painter's
extraordinary career had provided him with plenty of detractors, and
that his position at the head of the Academy would be resented by the
elderly unsuccessful gentlemen who knew that the experiment was being
watched from the highest quarters in Madrid.
It is not possible in this place to refer at any length to the
important work executed by Murillo in the first fifteen years of his
latest manner. To attempt such a task would be to compile a catalogue
that could hardly be of interest, save to the few English lovers of
Murillo, who know his work in National Gallery, Louvre, Prado,
Hermitage, and the public and private collections in Seville. Let it
suffice for the moment to point out that he had been honoured with
commissions to paint pictures for the Cathedral of Seville, once a
Temple to Venus, and possessing to this day, if the writer has been
truly informed, dungeons wherein the officers of Holy Inquisition
wrought their will upon the _corpus vile_ of the heretic. He decorated
the Chapel Royal in honour of the canonisation of St. Ferdinand. In
the Chapter Room of the Cathedral are eight portraits painted in oval
for the dome. All are saints, six men and two women, the latter being
St. Justa and St. Rufina, the patron saints of the city. In years to
come Goya was asked to paint St. Justa and St. Rufina, and showed his
respect for their sanctity by employing two courtesans to sit for the
portraits; but this is another story, and belongs to the time of the
French war and Ferdinand the Desired. There are countless studies of
Christ in the Cathedral, one as a lad, another at the Baptism by St.
John, a third in which the child Christ appears to St. Anthony of
Padua, another after the scourging. The picture of Christ and St.
Anthony was probably one of the finest of the master's works, but it
has been vilely restored. As a rule, the gentlemen employed in Spain
to restore masterpieces seem to have as much knowledge of art as the
African witch doctor has of the healing art that is practised by a
London Doctor of Medicine. It is only now and again, when one finds
Murillo at his best in a picture that has defied the assaults of time,
that one can realise what the cruel mercies of the restorer have done
to obscure the painter's work. They have accentuated the obvious,
turned sentiment into sentimentality, and made colour schemes lose
their refinement. If Shakespeare's sonnets had been found mutilated,
and had been restored by that "philosopher true," the late Martin
Tupper, we should have had in literature a counterpart of the result we
have here in art.
Beyond Murillo's highly important work in Seville Cathedral, attention
must be called to the pictures he painted for the Church of Santa Maria
la Blanca, the Convent of the Capuchins, and the Caridad. Only one of
them, a "Last Supper," not in the painter's best manner, remains there
to-day; but the splendid semicircular picture of the Conception, now in
the Louvre, was painted for Santa Maria la Blanca, and hung there until
Marshal Soult cast his rapacious, but well cultivated, regard upon it;
and in the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, where so many of the fine
Goyas are preserved, we can see two others, "The Dream" and "The
Senator and his Wife before the Pope." The story set out is founded
upon the legend of a Roman Senator and his wife, who being childless
vowed to leave their wealth to the Virgin. She appeared to them in a
dream, the infant Christ in her arms, and bade them erect to her a
church on the Esquiline, at a spot she indicated. To this dream the
Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome is said to owe its foundation.
The two canvases stolen or annexed by Soult were returned to Spain
after his death.
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