Bartolome Esteban Murillo

Bartolomé Estéban Murillo , 1617?-1682, Spanish religious and portrait painter. He was born in Seville, where most of his life was spent. There, c.1645, he painted a series of 11 pictures of the history of the Franciscan order for a monastery. These brought him immediate fame, and for the remainder of his life he was the favorite painter of the wealthy and pious Andalusian capital. His early works show the influence of Zurbarán in the dramatic use of light and shadow. Murillo adapted several compositions from northern and Italian prints. Notable works of his early years include St. Leander, St. Isidore, Vision of St. Anthony (all: cathedral, Seville), Birth of the Virgin (Louvre), and his series for the Church of Santa María la Blanca. In 1660 he was instrumental in founding the Seville Academy, of which he shared the presidency with the younger Francisco de Herrera. From 1670 to 1682, Murillo painted many of his major religious works, including those for the Charity Hospital and for the Capuchin convent (Seville Mus.). These religious works, particularly the Madonnas, are noted for their sweetness of mood. In 1682, while working on the Marriage of St. Catherine for the Capuchin church of Cádiz, Murillo fell from a scaffold and died as a result of his injuries. Murillo's greatest works include his fine portraits—e.g., Don Andrés de Andrade y la Col (Metropolitan Mus.) and Knight of the Collar (Prado)—and his naturalistic genre paintings, such as Girl and Her Duenna (National Gall., Washington, D.C.) and Peasant Boy (National Gall., London). While Murillo's work is best seen in Seville, fine examples are in the Prado and the Louvre, and in the New York, Detroit, Sarasota, and Cincinnati museums.

Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban (1617/18–82). Spanish painter, active for almost all his life in his native Seville. His early career is not well documented, but he started working in a naturalistic tenebrist style, showing the influence of Zurbarán. After making his reputation with a series of eleven paintings on the lives of Franciscan saints for the Franciscan monastery in Seville (1645–6, the pictures are now dispersed in Spain and elsewhere), he displaced Zurbarán as the city's leading painter and was unrivalled in this position for the rest of his life. His pre-eminence was acknowledged in 1660 when an academy of painting was founded in Seville (the first in Spain) and Murillo, together with Francisco Herrera the Younger, was appointed joint president. Most of his paintings are of religious subjects, appealing strongly to popular piety and illustrating the doctrines of the Counter-Reformation Church, above all the Immaculate Con ception, which was his favourite theme. His mature style was very different to that seen in his early works; it is characterized by idealized figures, soft, melting forms, delicate colouring, and sweetness of expression and mood. The term estilo vaporoso (‘vaporous style’) is often used of it. Murillo also painted genre scenes of beggar children that have a similar sentimental appeal, but his fairly rare portraits are strikingly different in feeling—much more sombre and intellectual (an outstanding self-portrait, c.1670, is in the NG, London). He died from the effects of injuries he sustained when he fell from scaffolding whilst painting a huge altarpiece of the Mystic Marriage of St Catherine for the Capuchin church in Cadiz; the picture, completed by his pupil Francisco Meneses Osorio (c.1640–1721), is now in the city's Museo de Bellas Artes. Murillo had many assistants and followers, and his style continued to influence Sevillian painting into the 19th century. His fame in the 18th century and early 19th century was enormous. With Ribera he was the only Spanish painter whose work was widely known outside Spain and he was ranked by many critics amongst the greatest artists of all time. Later his reputation plummeted, and he was dismissed as facile and sugary, but now that his own work is being distinguished from that of his numerous imitators his star is rising again.