(From the Louvre, Paris)
On several occasions Murillo chose the Nativity for the subject of his
great canvases. He was always safe to attract the admiration of his
clients by his reverent treatment of a scene that left so much to the
imagination of the artist. His pictures were very greatly admired by
the French invaders of Spain, and it was to Marshal Soult that many
Frenchmen owed their first introduction to Murillo.
[ILlustration: PLATE VII.--THE NATIVITY]
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The Caridad, a well-managed hospital, scrupulously clean, light and
airy, thrives to-day on the banks of the Guadalquivir, close to the
Tower of the Gold, and doubtless the writer is but one of many who have
spent long hours there, content to endure the sights and sounds of
suffering for the sake of the remnant of work that still graces the
wall of church and hospital. There would be much more than can be seen
to-day but for the visits of the indefatigable Marshal Soult, who had
such a penchant for the master's work that neither Cathedral nor
hospital could guard it from his eyes and hands. It is easy enough to
study Murillo in the public galleries, but it seems more satisfactory
to see his canvases in the places for which they were painted, and a
special interest attaches to the hospital of the Caridad, because it
was founded by one of the men whom an age of devout belief is apt to
produce from time to time--a desperate sinner turned saint. Don Miguel
Manara of Calatrava, born a few years after Murillo, was a man of
pleasure who wasted his substance in riotous living. One night as he
was reeling home from a debauch he saw a funeral procession approaching
him, the open bier surrounded by torch-bearing priests. "Whom do you
carry to the grave?" he cried, and one of the priests replied, "Don
Miguel Manara." Greatly terrified, the profligate looked at the corpse
and recognised the features as his own. Then he knew no more until
morning broke and he found himself in a church. Had he lived in this
prosaic age his friends would have taken him to a nursing home to enjoy
the benefits of bromide and a rest cure, but two hundred and fifty
years ago a man had to work out his own salvation. He did so very
thoroughly, turned from a profligate to a devotee and, after infinite
labour, founded the hospital and church of the Caridad on the ruins of
an early building of the same character. It is a splendid institution,
and preserves to this day the character proposed by its founder, whose
anxious careworn face looks at us from the canvas painted by Juan de
Valdes in the Cabilda. Murillo painted ten or eleven pictures for the
Church of San Jorge attached to the hospital; three remain: one is in
Madrid, and two are in the town house of the Duke of Sutherland.
Perhaps the "Moses" is the best of those that remain, but the Saint
Elizabeth of Hungary, now in Madrid, is a master work.
Gratitude for such favours as he had received would appear to have been
one of the painter's characteristics, and may be held accountable for
the splendid effort on behalf of the Franciscans, who in early days had
given the commission that made him famous. When the brethren appealed
to him in 1673 he was a rich man, and able to work as cheaply as in the
days when every real was worth saving. The Convent, then on the
outskirts of the city, had taken forty years or more in the building.
Now it needed decoration, and the brethren did not appeal in vain to
the greatest ecclesiastical painter of the day. We do not know his
fee, but we do know that he devoted six years to his task. Upwards of
a score of pictures testified at once to his devotion and to his skill,
for they are among the best he has painted, and happily the most of
them are to be seen in the Murillo Salon of the Seville Museum. The
brethren of St. Francis, though they made one or two exchanges of the
kind that Glaucus made with Diomedes, had the sense to put the canvases
they elected to preserve beyond the reach of Marshal Soult, and the
Salon of Trabella holds _inter alia_ the "St. Francis at the foot of
the Cross," "Justa and Rufina," "St. Thomas of Villanueva," and two
Conceptions. It will be remembered that the Papal Edict declaring the
Immaculacy of the Mother of God was issued in the year of Murillo's
birth, and doubtless many a devout Catholic believed that the painter
was given to Spain as a reward to Philip IV. by whose strenuous
endeavour Pope Paul V. had issued his momentous decree.
The pictures painted for the Franciscans were held by Murillo's
contemporaries to place a crown upon his achievements. Brilliant as
his work had been for the Cathedral and the Caridad, for the hospital
known as Los Venerables, and for the Church of the Augustines, the
Franciscans were held to have been the most fortunate of all the
painter's patrons, and his pictures gave an immense stimulus to the
labours of the Church. The Capuchins of Cadiz besought him to journey
to their city and to paint some pictures for their house. He had
already reached a great age and an assured position, and no pecuniary
recompense that the Capuchin Friars had to offer could have drawn him
from his beloved native city; but the temptation to work for the
greater glory of God was irresistible, and he set out. It was an
unfortunate journey. While engaged on a picture of the marriage of
Santa Catherine, he stumbled in mounting the scaffolding, and ruptured
himself badly. Suffering great pain, and unable or unwilling to
describe his condition precisely, he was brought back to Seville, and
we may feel assured that the journey must have aggravated his symptoms.
His children and friends did all they could to alleviate his
sufferings, but in those days of elemental knowledge rupture was not
readily diagnosed, nor was there any effective treatment. We are told
that the dying man was taken every day to the Church of the Holy Cross,
where he prayed beneath the shadow of Campana's "Descent." Feeling
that his end was upon him he sent for all his family and friends, and
with the evening of April 3, 1682, the end came. He was buried under
Campana's "Descent from the Cross," and his funeral afforded an
occasion for all classes of Seville to show how greatly they respected
the distinguished dead. He left but little money, though he had some
real estate and a valuable collection of plate and pictures. By his
will he left instructions that four hundred masses were to be said for
the repose of his soul--a generous allowance surely for one whose life
was singularly free from blame. His wife had predeceased him, but his
sister, for whom he had laboured in the far-off early days, survived;
she had married a distinguished man of noble birth. His children were
two sons and a daughter; the elder son was in the West Indies: the
second, who took to art, died before middle age.
You may find his work in all the great galleries to-day, but to know
Murillo intimately one must go to Spain--to Seville and Madrid for
choice. France boasts a fine collection, and many of those that adorn
our National Gallery, Dulwich and Wallace Collections, are worthy of
the painter. In Rome, Florence, Dresden, Munich, Berlin, Vienna, and
St. Petersburg he is represented by work that demands attention.
Doubtless much of his output has been lost, much has been restored to
death, some pictures remain to be discovered, but it should not be
difficult to compile a list of 500 pictures painted by Murillo, the
greater part in the third or "vaporoso" manner, and painted in the last
twenty-five years of his life. Had he not received the commission from
Cadiz, or had he refused to accept it, we may suppose that his output
would have been considerably greater than it was, for he was in
excellent health, was a conscientious worker, and was painting his
finest pictures. He has enabled us to know what manner of man he was
by the records of his life, by his work, and by several portraits of
himself that he painted. Two are in England. One of the painter in
his youth was bought by Sir Francis Cook at the Louis Philippe sale in
1853, and is now at Doughty House; another painted in later years is in
Lord Spencer's famous collection at Althorp. There are said to be
others on the Continent; one, said by those who have seen it to be the
best of all, was formerly in the Louvre, but its present resting-place
is not known to the writer. The artist suffers to-day from the fact
that Velazquez was his contemporary, and from the indiscriminate praise
of those who became acquainted with him for the first time when Soult
came back from the wars. His panegyrists ignored or never saw his
weakness, the theatrical posing of his figures, the ever-recurring
sacrifice of reason to sentiment, of strength to prettiness. His
detractors, on the other hand, have blinded themselves to the beauty of
his conceptions, the skill of his compositions, the exquisite quality
of his colouring, and the spirit of genuine belief that kept a subject
from becoming hackneyed, even when he had painted it a score of times.
He did repeat himself; if we are not mistaken he has more than a score
of canvases known to-day, setting out the story of the Immaculate
Conception. The writer has seen some ten or twelve in Spain and
France, and though the treatment is fairly uniform, each has been the
object of the artist's most meticulous handling; indeed, it is on this
account that the central figure lacks the charm that comes to the
little angels clinging round her.
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