Bartolome Esteban Murillo: The Complete Story
While his fellow Spanish painters filled churches with harsh martyrdoms and stern saints, one artist painted ragged street children grinning over a plate of fruit. Bartolome Esteban Murillo was the gentlest of the great Spanish Baroque masters, so loved for centuries that the backlash, when it came, was just as fierce.
Where his countrymen chose severity, Murillo chose warmth, soft Virgins, glowing children and everyday tenderness, and Seville adored him for it.
The sweetness of the sacred
Murillo became the favourite religious painter of Seville, famous above all for his many versions of the Immaculate Conception, the Virgin floating in soft light among clouds and cherubs.
His warm, hazy manner sat at the tender end of Baroque art, far from the dark drama of Caravaggio followers.
The children of the street
His most surprising works show poor children of Seville, beggars and urchins eating fruit, playing dice or grinning at the viewer, painted with dignity and affection rather than pity.
These tender scenes of ordinary life, unusual for the time, are some of the warmest genre painting of the whole Baroque.
Loved too much, then dropped
For two hundred years Murillo was ranked among the greatest painters in Europe, copied and adored. Then taste turned against him, and critics dismissed his sweetness as sentimental and shallow.
Only recently has he been reassessed, with his technical brilliance and his street children winning back the respect that the holy pictures had lost.
A fall from the scaffold
Murillo stayed busy to the end. While working high on a scaffold on a large altarpiece in Cadiz, the elderly painter fell and was badly injured.
He never fully recovered and died not long after, in 1682, in his beloved Seville, the city he had painted all his life.
What people ask about Murillo
What is he known for?
Soft religious paintings like the Immaculate Conception and tender scenes of street children.
Why did his reputation fall?
After centuries of fame, critics dismissed his sweetness, before a modern revival.
Was he from Seville?
Yes, he was born, worked and died in Seville.
When did he die?
In 1682, after a fall from a scaffold.
Why the tenderness lasts
Murillo painted warmth in an age of Spanish severity, and the world loved him for it, then punished him for it, and is now learning to love him again. The ragged children he sketched in the streets may outlast every saint he ever painted.
Orphaned as a boy and raised by relatives, he later helped found the first art academy in Seville and served as its head, giving the city the kind of training he himself never had. He was hugely productive, filling the convents and churches of Seville with altarpieces, and his soft, glowing manner was copied so widely across Spain and its colonies that for generations it simply was what religious painting looked like. His Immaculate Conceptions in particular were treated almost as official images of the doctrine. Spanish collectors and the royal court prized his work, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries his paintings were among the most copied and most forged in all of Europe, a sign of just how completely his gentle vision had conquered popular taste before the critics turned.