II, BARTOLOME ESTEBAN MURILLO THE J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM LIBRARY THE SPANISH SERIES MURILLO THE SPANISH SERIES EDITED BY ALBERT F. CALVERT Seville MURILLO Cordova The Prado The Escorial Spanish Arms and Armour In preparation — Goya Toledo Madrid Velazquez Granada and Alhambra Royal Palaces of Spain Leon, Burgos & Salamanca Valladolid, Oviedo, Segovia, Zamora, Avila & Zaragoza MURILLO A BIOGRAPHY AND APPRECIATION BY ALBERT F. CALVERT WITH 165 ILLUSTRATIONS REPRODUCED FROM THE MOST FAMOUS OF MURILLO'S PICTURES ^ ^ ^ HD LONDON : JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD NEW YORK : JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMVH E. Goodman and Son, The Plicenix Press, Taunton THE J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM LIBRARY To THE MARQUIS OF VILLALOBAR, Chamberlain to His Catholic Majesty, Minister for Spain in London. My dear Marquis, When I stop for a moment to think of the many times I have had occasion to express my thanks to you in the course of my work in connection with Spain, I am reminded of an obligation that I find myself power- less adequately to acknowledge. And so, lacking better means of assuring you of my deep appreciation of all your kindness, allow me to claim an author's privilege, and in asking you to accept the dedication of this little book, make a public avowal of my gratitude and add yet another phrase to my frequent and sincere thanks. Believe me. My dear Marquis, Your ever grateful and obliged, ALBERT F. CALVERT. PREFACE In making Bartolome Esteban Murillo the subject of an early volume of the new Spanish Series I was influenced by two principal considera- tions. The art of the painter of the Conceptions, and of the even more widely-known Beggar Boys, has been exhaustively treated in nearly every European language ; but in the English, I am not acquainted with any popular and unpretentious biography and guide to the works of Murillo, on the Hues of this httle book. Although Murillo and Velazquez have been proclaimed side by side as the " noblest artist " and the " greatest painter " that Spain has pro- duced, the illustrious Court-painter to Phihp IV. has ever, and quite properly, received the lion's share of popularity. Velazquez has been familiar- ised to the English public by several inexpensive and adequate volumes, while Murillo has waited long for his introduction to the domestic hearth of the general reader. viii PREFACE The belief that the time has arrived for an attempt to be made to furnish a brief but com- prehensive survey of Murillo's masterpieces, might of itself be considered a sufficient apology for this publication, but I possess, I hope, an additional excuse in what has been described as the most complete series of reproductions of any one artist's pictures ever brought together. The delays that have occurred in completing the book, and the postponement of publication, have been occasioned by delays in obtaining little known examples, and by the substitution of better illus- trations for others already selected and printed. In this volume the writer's object has been to consider the painter's art in its relation to the religious feeling of the age in which he lived, and to examine the artist's attitude towards his art. Murillo was the product of his religious era, and of his native Andalusia. To the rest of Europe, in his lifetime, he signiiied little or nothing. He painted to the order of the religious brotherhoods of his neighbourhood ; his works were immured in local monasteries and cathedrals, and, passing immediately out of circulation, were neglected or entirely forgotten. PREFACE ix But the romance from which Murillo's Hfe was almost free attaches to his pictures, which, after being concealed for two hundred years in shaded cloisters and dim convent recesses, were torn from their obscurity by the commercial greed of Napoleon's generals, and thrust before the amazed and admiring eyes of Europe. The fame of the " Divine Murillo," which grew beneath the shadow of the altar, was re-bom amid the clash of arms, and in countries which for two centuries had forgotten his existence, he lived again the triumph which was his in his life-time. In the text which accompanies the illustrations, I have propounded no new theory regarding the artist's work, and while I have ranged at large over the field of Murillo literature, from Richard Cum- berland's " Anecdotes of Eminent Painters in Spain " (1782) to Sir WilUam Stirling-Maxwell's " Annals of the|Artists of Spain," and from Cean Bermudez' " Diccionario historico de las mas ilustres professores de las bellas artes en Espaiia," his " Descripcion artlstica de la Cathedral de Sevilla," and Francisco Pacheco's "Arte de la Pintura," to Paul Lefort's " La peinture Espag- nols " ; I cannot claim to have enriched the X PREFACE biographies of the painter with a single new fact. But in this volume I have succeeded — with the invaluable assistance of Rafael Garzon, Franz Hanfstaengl, J. Lacoste, Braun Clement and Co., Mansell and Co., and other eminent artists and photographers, to whom I hereby desire to ack- nowledge my indebtedness and express my thanks — in getting together reproductions of over 165 of MuriUo's pictures. On the strength of this modest but unprecedented achievement, I submit my monograph to the favour of the public. A. F. C. " ROYSTON," Swiss Cottage, N.W. Chronology of Events in the Life of Bartolomd Estdban Murillo 1617. Last week of December. Bom in Seville. 1618. January ist. Baptised in the parish church of La Magdalena. 1618-1629. Lost his parents by a malignant epidemic ; was adopted by his uncle, Juan Agustin Lagares ; apprenticed to Juan del Castillo. 1632. Painted the " Virgin with St. Francis " for the Convent de Regina. 1640. Juan del Castillo closed his studio and went to Cadiz. 1640-1642. Sold pictures painted on saga-cloth at the weekly fairs in the Macarena of Seville. 1642. Pedro de Moya returned to Seville. Murillo departed for Madrid. 1642-1645. Studied in the Royal Galleries of Madrid under the guidance of Velaz- quez. 1645. Returned to Seville. 1646. Painted his first great cycle of pictures for the Franciscan Convent of Seville. xii CHRONOLOGY 1648. Married Dona Beatriz de Cabrera y Soto- mayor. 1648-1652. The period of his estilo frio, or cold style. 1652. Commenced his estilo cdlido, or warm style, in picture of " Our Lady of the Con- ception," for the Brotherhood of the True Cross. 1655. Painted " St. Leander," " St. Isidore," and a " Nativity of the Virgin " for the Cathedral of Seville. 1656. Painted "St. Anthony of Padua" for Seville Cathedral. Commenced his third style, el vaporoso, in four pictures for the Church of Santa Maria la Blanca. 1658. Projected his scheme for founding an Academy of Arts in Seville. 1660. Academy of Arts established, with Murillo and Herrera as first presidents. 1 671. Executed the most important decorations of Seville Cathedral for canonisation ceremony of Ferdinand III. 1671-1675. Painted his series of pictures for the Hospitad de la Caridad. 1675-1681. Painted his great series of twenty pictures for the Capuchin Convent, a CHRONOLOGY xiii series for the Hospitad de los Vener- ables, several pictures for the Augustine Friars, " The Guardian Angel," the Louvre ' ' Conception, ' ' and many other famous compositions. 1 68 1. Visited Cadiz to paint some pictures for the Capuchin Convent. 1682. Painted " The Holy Family " (National Gallery) . Also executed several small pictures for the Capuchin Convent at Cadiz. While painting " The Espousals of St. Catherine " for the altar of the same convent, he fell from the scaffold- ing and contracted the injury which caused his death . Returned to Seville . Died 3rd of April. Buried in the church of Santa Cruz, Seville. MURILLO ^ I- Diego de Silva, who is known to the world as Velazquez, and Bartolome Esteban, who like his great contemporary is more generally called by his mother's patronymic, Murillo, had many points in common. They were both natives of Seville ; both embraced the pursuit of Art with the same singleness of purpose ; and each achieved a bril- liant career — the unblemished careers of men who, as has been written of one of them, " in the height of worldly success never lost the kindness of heart and simplicity of disposition which had charac- terised the student years." But while their names are, for these reasons, frequently hnked together in the annals of Art as Spain's twin contribution to the immortal band of world- painters, their paths in life were placed wide apart, and from the first their aims were different. Velazquez, the eagle, soared in the B 2 MURILLO rarefied atmosphere of the Court ; he was robed in jewelled velvets, and was carried to his last resting-place by nobles as became a Knight of Santiago. Murillo's way took him through shady cloisters and the dim-lit stillnesses of con- vents and cathedrals. From the practice of an art, derived from and devoted to the Spanish Catholic religion, and the companionship of priests, he passed to an honoured grave beneath a stone slab, still preserved behind the high altar of the church of Los Menores, on which, by his own desire, was carved his name, a skeleton, and these two words — VIVE MORITURUS. But the remains of neither Velazquez nor Murillo survived the vandal excesses of the French in the Peninsula. The Church of San Juan in Madrid was pillaged and pulled down in 1811, and the ashes of Velazquez that reposed there were scat- tered to the winds, while Soult in Seville reduced the Church of S*^- Cruz to a ruin, and the bones of Murillo were lost beneath a weed-covered mound of rubbish. Velazquez, says an Italian commentator, was an eagle in art, and Murillo an angel ; the one all sparkle and vivacity, the other all softness. Velazquez drew his inspiration from nature by MURILLO 3 patient and continuous study ; Murillo lived by the composition of altar-pieces and in meditation upon the histories of the Virgin and St. Francis. And their styles varied in accordance with their several purposes, and the inspiration of the distinctive sur- roundings in which they laboured. The one, working amongst connoisseurs in art, and enjoying leisure and a fixed salary, was able to bestow much care upon the execution of his works ; while the other, spurred into ceaseless activity by the continuous demands upon his brush made on behalf of reli- gious houses, had not the same time to give to the elaboration of details, and was compelled to rest satisfied with less technical excellence. It is further worthy of remark, as Sir William Stirhng- Maxwell has pointed out, that the court-painter, whose pictures were the ornaments of palaces, has been less exposed to have clumsy forgeries fathered upon him than the provincial artist, whose works were scattered far and wide among the convents of Andalusia. Of the styles of the two painters it has been said that they are so different and opposite that the most unlearned could scarcely mistake them ; and Sir David Wilkie, in comparing Velazquez and Murillo, has indicated the peculiar merits of each without awarding the palm to either. It must 4 MURILLO however be remembered that this appraisement was made during the Victorian era of criticism. " Velazquez," he says, " has more intellect and expression, more to surprise and captivate the artist. Murillo has less power, but a higher aim in colouring ; in his flesh he has an object distinct from most of his contemporaries, and seems, like Rembrandt, to aim at the general character of flesh when tinged with the light of the sun. His colour seems adapted for the highest class of art ; it is never minute or particular, but a general and poetical recollection of nature. For female and infantile beauty, he is the Correggio of Spain. Velazquez, by his high technical excellence, is the delight of all artists ; Murillo, adapting the higher subjects of art to the commonest understanding, seems, of all painters, the most universal favourite." Murillo was born in Seville, as the year 1617 ended, and was baptised on the ist of January, 1618, at the parish church of La Magdalena, which was destroyed by the French in 1810. Palomino fixed 1613 as the date of the painter's birth, and for a birthplace allotted him Pilas, a village some five leagues distant from Seville ; but these details have been authoritatively corrected by Cean Ber- mudez. His baptismal register can still be seen in the Dominican church of San Pablo, which now serves as the parish church of La Magdalena. Murillo's parents, Caspar Esteban and Maria Perez, were humble toilers in the city, and the narrow, awning- covered street in the Jewish MURILLO 5 quarter in which he was born is situated in the meanest part of the city. Nothing is recorded of Murillo's life until he had entered his eleventh year, when his parents died of a malignant epi- demic. The lad with his little sister went to live with a kindly uncle, a medical practitioner, named Juan Agustin Lagares, who resided in Seville. But Lagares' means were meagre ; and young Murillo, who had already revealed his power in drawing, was speedily transferred, as a non-paying appren- tice, to the studio of Juan del Castillo. Here, in the intervals of his duties, which consisted in the mixing of paints, the stretching of canvases, and other less artistic utihty work, he studied with unwearied zeal. Castillo, who was brought up in the Florentine traditions of a much earlier period was, according to Bermudez, a dry and hard colourist, and although his design may perhaps be accounted good, he was certainly one of the worst painters the school of Seville has produced. Murillo's impressionable nature inevitably caught and reflected in his early work something of his master's style, and it is not surprising to learn that his first known picture, a " Virgin with St. Francis," which was painted at the age of fifteen for the Convent de Regina, impressed Sir Edmund Head, who saw it in the collection of Prebendary 6 MURILLO Pereria at Seville, as " hard and flat," and " giving little or no promise of the artist's future excel- lence." Another picture, painted about the same time, depicting " Our Lady attended by Santo Domingo," which once hung in the College of St. Thomas, is also described as reflecting the hard academic style of his master. In 1640, when Murillo was twenty-three years old, Juan del Castillo removed his studio to Cadiz, and his pupil remained in Seville to fend for himself and his younger sister — an obligation almost beyond his powers to fulfil. He was very poor, and, being without friends or influence, was often hard put to it to procure the means to satisfy their few modest needs. A small number of poorly-paid commissions came his way from unimportant convents and churches, but no priestly patron detected the latent talent in his work ; and Seville was rich in artists, who could cover the consecrated walls of his native city with far greater dexterity, and to whom the market price of pigments was a matter of less concern. Murillo was compelled by lack of pence to supple- ment his income by painting rude pictures on saga-cloth, and hawking them in the Feria, or weekly fair, held every Thursday in the Macarena. Saga-cloth is a loose-textured material, not unhke MURILLO 7 bunting, its rough surface encouraging an artistic tendency towards broad effects, and conducing to the greatest freedom of treatment. The pictures he produced under these conditions were bright, pleasing, and effective, and they found a ready sale in the Macarena, which is still the slum suburb of Seville, and where, even to-day, the frequenters delight in fierce colour, and have a sublime con- tempt for subtlety of observation, or fidelity to nature. Oftentimes the pedlar-painter would revise his studies to suit the taste of the customer, or he would execute a commission to order while the prospective purchaser idled beneath the shade of an awning. In Seville a pintura de la Feria is a term still applied to a bad painting, while a picture which possesses exceptional merit is com- mended to this day as a " Murillo." It is the Andalusian colloquial equivalent in criticism for a work of surpassing excellence, which the American enthusiast would describe as " a peach." Stirling-Maxwell, in his explanation of the use of the term " Murillo," says that in Andalusia the painter holds a place in the affections of the people hardly lower than that accorded to Cervantes. Like Correggio at Parma, and like Rubens at Antwerp, he is still the pride and idol of his native city. When the great drama of Corneille was yet in the mom- 8 MURILLO ing of its glory, it became a common expression of praise in France to say of anything admirable that it was " beau comme Le Cid." In Castile, when the most fertile and versatile of writers, Lope de Vega, was daily astonishing the literary world with some new masterpiece, the word " Lope " came to be used in common speech as synonymous with excellent. The French metaphor, in the course of time, has fallen into desuetude, and the epithet has become obsolete in the Castilian. But in Seville they still call any picture that especially arouses their admiration, a " Murillo " ; not that it may pass for one of his works, but to express its beauty in a word that to them suggests beauty more vividly than any other in that copious language. In the Macarena, in the 17th century, many artists congregated to sell their pictures, for the Feria presented a ready market for religious daubs of every kind, and vast quantities were shipped off. in company with great store of relics and in- dulgences, to adorn the churches, convents, and colonial homes of transatlantic Spain. The 'pren- tice artists of Seville, who practised this extem- pore kind of painting, and grappled with the diffi- culties of the palette before they had learned to draw, have been compared by Bermudez to those intrepid students who seek to acquire a foreign MURILLO 9 language by speaking it, and afterwards, if oppor- tunity serves, improve their knowledge of the idiom by means of books. But if the pictures were indifferent, the prices demanded for them were very small, and it must be admitted that the system has been productive of some able painters. It was in the Feria that Murillo studied the beggar boys, who were to be the subjects of so many of his famous pictures, and it is obvious that he studied them with an eye to the market. One has only to glance at his " impossibly sinless and confiding " httle ragamuffins to recognise that when he gazed upon them his senses were con- cerned less with life than with the making of pic- tures. His vision was bounded by the limitations of his larder, and he saw them as possible subjects for pictures which, above all other considerations, must be saleable. In order to sell they must please, and in his determination to please, the artist transformed these dirty, unkempt, ill-deve- loped and disreputable mendicants of SeviUe into incarnations of picturesque innocence — smooth, smiling, and cherubic. As human documents, they have small resemblance to truth, but they are always pleasing, and, outside Spain, these excellent examples of genre are as well known as any of MuriUo's pictures. 10 MURILLO But the day was approaching when this mer- chant of the sidewalk — this creator of pictures while you wait, was to make his last descent upon the Feria before starting on his life's work. In the studio of Juan del Castillo, Murillo had made the acquaintance of a fellow apprentice, Pedro de Moya, of Granada, who is known to students of Spanish art as the soldier-artist. This painter of second, or perhaps third-rate merit, but with a certain power of learning from the genius of others — a power so common to painters of Spain — was of a roving, adventurous temperament. He laid aside his pencil to trail a pike in the army of Flanders, or, rather, he laid about him with pencil and pike alternately, cultivating art amidst the bustle of the camp, and employ- ing the intervals between his military duties in copying the pictures which abounded in the churches of the Low Countries. Fired by the canvases of Vandyck, Moya obtained his discharge from the Spanish army, and in the summer of 1641 he crossed over to England to become the pupil of the great Fleming. Vandyck received his Spanish visitor kindly, but within six months of Moya's arrival in England his master was dead, and the soldier-painter returned to Spain. In Seville, Moya renewed his friendship with MURILLO II Murillo, and, insignificant mannerist as the Gran- adian may have been, his copies of the soft lights and dehcate colouring of Vandyck were a revela- tion to the student of Castillo's hard contours. As he pondered these sketches, and listened to the experiences of his old studio-companion, the dor- mant ambition of Murillo was awakened. He deter- mined to visit Rome or Flanders, and see for him- self the artistic wonders of which he heard. But for purposes of travel money was a necessity, and the young enthusiast was penniless. Italy and the Low Countries were beyond the reach of his most extravagant hopes, but Madrid was compara- tively accessible. He purchased a quantity of saga-cloth, and cutting it into the most market- able sizes, he primed and prepared the little squares, and immediately set to work to cover them with saleable daubs. Saints and Madonnas, flower pieces and landscapes, sacred hearts and fanciful cascades — he painted them all and dis- posed of his entire stock to a speculative ship- owner for re-sale in the South American colonies. He then placed his sister under suitable protec- tion, and without informing anybody of his plans or his destination, in 1642 he disappeared from Seville. Three years later he returned as mysteriously 12 MURILLO as he had gone, to be acclaimed by his admiring countrymen as the first painter of Andalusia. The interval had been occupied in unceasing work. Murillo had copied the masterpieces of the Spanish, Venetian and Flemish schools, drawing much from casts and from the hfe, and following a thorough system of education under the advice and protection of the King's painter, Velazquez. The attitude of the great artist towards his impe- cunious fellow townsman, the youth of twenty- five, with the thick black hair and weather-worn garments, shows Velazquez in a most amiable light. He not only questioned his visitor about his family and his ambitions and his motive for undertaking so long and perilous a journey, but, being satisfied with his honesty of purpose, he provided him with a lodging in his own house, procured him admission to the Alcazar, Escorial, and the other royal galleries : more than this, he examined the young student's paintings, pointed out his deficiencies, warned him of the pitfalls most dangerous to his genius, explained the secret of " relief," and submitted specimens of his work to the King and the all-powerful minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares. Had ever young artist so munificent a friend and patron ? What the art of Murillo owes to the great-hearted, generous MURILLO 13 Velazquez — "our Velazquez," as Palomino proudly calls him — can never be over-stated. Murillo's spirit responded to the inspiration of the new world which Velazquez revealed to him. By the advice of his master he restricted himself largely to the study of Ribera — better known as " Lo Spagnoletto " — Vandyck, and Velazquez, and on the return of the Court from the triumph of Lerida in 1644, he surprised Velazquez with some pictures of such undoubted excellence that his judicious critic pronounced him ripe for Rome. He offered him money to cover his expenses, and letters of introduction to facilitate his visit, but Murillo declined to leave his native soil. Velaz- quez advised, persuaded, remonstrated ; ' but to no purpose. For some reason or reasons that have never been made clear, he refused to under- take the journey. He may have been recalled to Seville by his sister, or it is possible that he con- sidered he had learned enough to enable him to gratify his ambition of portraying Andalusia. His apprenticeship was at an end, and his be- loved province was calling him back to Seville. Where others would have thirsted for the widen- ing inspiration of Italy, he hungered to reproduce himself in his native city. He had learned too early the fascination of turning out pictures to 14 MURILLO study longer in what to him probably seemed unfruitfulness, and he was longing to begin his life's work of producing saleable pictures, always pictures, and yet more pictures. In 1645 he parted from his friend, and returned to Seville, never to see Madrid or Velazquez again. An Andalusian he was born, and, in the charmed atmosphere of his beautiful native city, he lived and worked to the close of his life ; a life varied only by an occasional journey to Cadiz, or possibly to some other town within the province. In point of fact his visit to Cadiz, on which he met with the accident which caused his death, is the only authentic instance we have of his ever again leav- ing the shadow of the Giralda Tower. Palomino tells us that about the year 1670 a " Concep- tion " by Murillo created a great stir in the artistic circles of Madrid, and that his presence in the capital was commanded by Charles II. The same authority declares that the painter pleaded as an excuse for not obeying the royal mandate that he was too old to travel ; but as the painter was only fifty-three years of age at the time, and the King was still a child, the story is probably a fabrication. The only fact in connection with the incident is that, whether the artist was invited or not, he did not go to Madrid. MURILLO 15 Tradition asserts that towards the close of his life Murillo occupied a house at the corner of the Plaza de Santa Cruz, but on his return to Seville in 1645 he is said to have lived at No. 7 Plaza de Alfaro, near the Calle Rope de Rueda. He came back as quietly as he had departed, and waited, with what patience he might, for an opportunity to reveal to his fellow-townsmen the craftsman- ship he had learned in Madrid. Nor had he long to wait for his chance. The friars of the fine Franciscan convent, then situated behind the Casa del Ayuntamiento, had for immediate use a small sum of money collected by one of their begging brotherhoods ; this they decided to employ in painting a series of pictures for their small cloister. But it was no slight thing they wanted ; nothing less than eleven large pictures would content them ; and their available capital is described, in default of actual figures, as " paltry." Certainly it was not sufficient to enlist the brushes of Herrera or Pacheco, or Zurbaran, but to the needy, unknown, aspiring Murillo, the opportunity represented, to use once more that well-used, but, in this case, apt, quotation, that ..." Tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune." Indeed, he was more eager to accept the friars' i6 MURILLO beggarly pay than they were to engage his ser- vices ; nothing but the poverty of the Franciscans induced them to close with his offer. Yet that reluctantly given, ill-paid commission was to make the Franciscan convent of Seville famous throughout the world, and for ever to estab- lish the reputation of Murillo. His work burst on the Sevillians as a miracle of wonder ; they mar- velled at, but could not understand, the amazing transformation that was revealed in his style. Antonio del Castillo y Saavedra, of Cordova, nephew of Juan del Castillo, and one of the ablest among the less-known painters of Andalusia, was the first to recognise his power. " Castillo is dead !" he cried, first pierced with that jealousy, which some say caused his death, " but how is it possible that Murillo, my uncle's servile pupil, can have arrived at so much grace of style and beauty of colouring ?" None of the Franciscan cycle of pictures are now to be seen in Seville. Soult, when he gutted the convent, carried off all save one, which was too stiff to roll up ; but of these, " The Charity of San Diego," and " St. Francis listening to the Heavenly Musician," have been returned to Spain. Cean Bermudez tells us that the influ- ence of the young painter's course of study at MURILLO 17 Madrid was plainly seen in these works. In the colouring of one there was " much of the strength of Ribera, with a super-added softness and delicacy of tone " ; another revealed " all the life-like truth and accuracy of detail which distin- guished the early studies of Velazquez " ; and the face in a third picture, " might have been painted by Vandyck himself." The figure of St. Francis of Assisi, reclining on his pallet with a crucifix in his hand, and listening to the melody of a violin, played near his ear by an angelic musician, is de- scribed by Bermudez as finely conceived and no less carefully executed, while the graceful pose of the angel and the devout ecstasy which beams from the countenance of the Saint, were charac- teristics calculated to exercise an irresistible fas- cination upon the emotional Sevillian tempera- ment. The group of ragged beggars and urchins soliciting the bounty of San Diego of Alcala is a study revealing the painter's Feria experiences executed in the manner of Velazquez. Other pic- tures are described as containing excellent heads and draperies. It is the head of Santa Clara, as she is represented dying in the midst of a group of virgins, which Bermudez declares worthy of the genius of Vandyck. Antonio Ponz, one of the most laborious, and c i8 MURILLO also it must be owned the most inaccurate, of Spanish writers on art, signals out for special praise a composition of six figures, representing San Gil standing in a religious ecstasy in the pre- sence of Pope Gregory II. This picture passed into the gallery of the Marquess Aguado and eventually found its way to England. This is the canvas which resisted the efforts of Soult to roll ; it represents a holy Franciscan praying over the body of a dead grey friar as if about to restore him to life. It is painted in a strong Ribera-like style, though here, as is usual in his work, a tendency to sentiment and triviality weakens its inherent realism. It is worthy of remark, though the happy chance can scarcely be credited to the prescience of the military robber, that Soult's burglarious stripping of the Franciscan convent saved these Murillos to the world, for in 1810 the building was destroyed by fire. Such were the pictures which reveal to modern eyes — so far as they can be judged by the two that are to be seen in Madrid — a mixture of realism and emo- tionalism — a religious emotionalism combined with an idealised fidelity to the model, and a pas- sion to please, allied with a mission to expound, in colour, the teaching of the Church. Murillo accepted the public verdict which MURILLO 19 ordained him the pictorial exponent of Roman Cathohcism, and his success inspired him to greater efforts in the production of yet more pictures. For the Franciscan series filled the convent with crowds of artistic and critical visitors, who published abroad the fame of the new star that had arisen. In a moment Murillo became the most popular painter in Seville ; the idol of Andalusia. His reputation was estab- lished, and commissions began to pour in upon the happy favourite. Andalusia was opulent, and could afford to deal liberally with its idols. The fortune of Murillo was made. Although much has been written in denunciation of the collecting propensities of the French generals, Soult and Sebastiani, during the Peninsu- lar War, it must be admitted that their robberies served a utilitarian purpose in drawing attention to the stores of artistic masterpieces that until then had been unknown, unappreciated, and unsus- pected, hidden away in Spain. Twenty-five years before that war Murillo was very little known beyond the boundaries of his own province of Andalusia, where large numbers of his pictures were immured in the palaces of the nobles. Richard Cumberland, politician and playwright, when Secretary to the Board of Trade, was sent 20 MURILLO on a secret commission to Spain in 1780, which, un- fortunate in itself, enabled him to express the following opinion regarding the Spaniards' neglect of their art treasures : " As for Murillo, although some pieces of his have been exported from Seville, yet I think I may venture to say that not many of them which pass under his name are legitimate, and in a less proportion can we find such as are true pictures any of so capital a rank as to impart a competent idea of his extraordinary merit. ... In private houses it is not unusual to discover very fine pictures in neglect and decay, thrown aside among the rubbish of cast off furniture, whether it be that the possessor has no knowledge of their excellence, or thinks it below his notice to attend to their preservation ; but how much soever the Spaniards have declined from their former taste and passion for the elegant arts, I am persuaded they have in no degree fallen off from their national character for generosity, which is still so prevalent among them that a stranger who is interestedly disposed to avail himself of their munificence, may, in a great measure, obtain whatever is the object of his praise and admiration." In order to restrain this despoiling of his country, Charles III., in 1779, issued an edict prohibiting the exportation of pictures by Murillo, the merit of whose genre studies had gained a place in the galleries of Europe, which was denied to his religious works until some time afterwards. So little was Spanish art known to the rest of Europe prior to the Peninsular War that the cata- logues of the rich collection of our Charles I. do MURILLO 21 not contain the name of a single Spanish master. John Evelyn, in his " Memoirs," puts it on record that at the sale of Lord Melford's effects at White- hall, in 1693, " Lord Godolphin bought the pic- ture of the Boys, by Morillio, the Spaniard, for eighty guineas," and he adds by way of comment, that it was " deare enough." In his " Anecdotes" of about a century later, Cumberland asserts that Murillo was better known in England than any Spanish master except Ribera, but he " very much doubts if any historical group or composition of his be in English hands." Europe's estimation of Spanish art in the eighteenth century is revealed in the " Reflections on Poetry and Painting," first published in Paris in 1719 by the Abbe Dubois, who instances Spain as one of those unfortunate countries where the climate is unfavourable to art (!), and remarks that she had produced no painter of the first class, and scarcely two of the second — thus erasing from the book of fame, by a stroke of his pen, the names of Murillo and Velazquez, of El Greco and Goya, of Mazo, whose work is sometimes, not inexcus- ably, ascribed to Velazquez — Morales, Cano, Ribera, and Zurbaran ! But Europe's long ignorance of the countless treasures of Spanish painting was soon to be dis- 22 MURILLO pelled, and the country was literally to be turned inside out to the covetous gaze of the art world. That rich, unexplored field of the dealer and col- lector was ripe for the exploitation of military con- noisseurs, and its treasure house was to be prised by the swords of the French marshals. " To swell the catalogue of the Louvre," writes Stirling- Maxwell in his ' Annals,' " was part of the recognised duty of the French armies ; to form a gallery for himself had become the ambition of almost every military noble of the Empire. The sale of the ' Orleans,' ' Calonne,' and other great collec- tions, had made the acquisition of works of art fashionable in England, and had revived the spirits of the elder Arundels and Oxfords in the Carlisles and the Gowers. With the troops of Moore and Wellesley, British picture-dealers took the field, well armed with guineas. The Peninsula was over- run by dilettanti, who invested galleries with consummate skill, and who captured altar-pieces by brilliant manceuvres, that would have covered them with stars had they been employed against batteries and brigades. Convents and cathedrals — venerable shrines of art — were beset by con- noisseurs, provided with squadrons of horse or letters of exchange, and demanding the surrender of the Murillos or Canos within ; and priest and prebend, prior or abbot, seldom refused to yield to the menaces of death or the tempta- tion of dollars. Soult at Seville, and Sebastiani at Granada, collected with unerring taste and unexampled rapacity ; and having thus signalised themselves as robbers in war, became no less eminent as picture-dealers in peace. King Joseph himself showed great judgment and presence of mind in his selection of the gems of art which he snatched at the last moment from the gallery of the Bourbons as he fled from their palaces at Madrid. Suchet, Victor, and a few of ' the least erected spirits,' valued paintings only for the gold and jewels on their frames ; but the French captains in general had profited by their morning lounges in the Louvre, and had keen eyes as well for a saleable picture as for a good position." II. Before proceeding to consider Europe's estimate of Murillo's art, it may be opportune here to ex- plain the relation of the painter to his pictures, by a brief survey of the attitude of Catholic Spain to- wards the great art movement of the seventeenth century. At that time, when poetry and painting in Italy and Flanders, and later on in France and to some extent in England, were deriving inspiration from the joyous well-springs of romance, Spanish art and culture were recovering, under the aegis of the Church and Crown, from the long years of conflict with the Moor, which had done so much to retard its artistic life. The Christians, after centuries of warfare, intermittent, it is true, but never really-ceasing, were freed by a gigantic effort, inspired by Rome, and led by a king, who was termed holy during his life, and was subsequently enrolled among the saints of the Church. The Christian faith, in a barbarous and severe manner, engrossed the minds of soldier and student, of artist and man of science alike. As Mr. Charles Ricketts points out, Spain inherited her share of the Renaissance only at a time when 24 MURILLO the counter-Renaissance, the CathoHc revival, had over-shadowed its expression, and something taciturn and indifferent in the Spanish people themselves made them unable to forget the in- fluence of the Inquisition, which the policy of Isabella and the rapine of the crafty Ferdinand had established there. This dark and restraining influence limited the subjects of the Spanish painter, and, in most cases, determined his treat- ment of them. Fancy and imagination were held subject to an austere mentor, and, chained to religious thought, became emphatic and osten- tatious : rarely could the painter indulge his love of the beautiful ; in portraiture alone he was free, and perhaps for this reason we find that the finest painters of Spain fulfil themselves most frankly in the technical development of their art. It is this excellent technique which elevates many of its painful and otherwise revolting scenes of martyr- dom — such, for instance, as the grand " El Mar- tirio de San Bartolome," by Ribera — into noble works of taste, wherein we are reconciled to the matter of the pictures by the surpassing skill of the painters. It cannot be too strongly insisted upon that Spanish art was made a servant and minister of the Church ; speaking her thoughts and teaching MURILLO 25 her lessons. Art for art's sake was an ideal that the boldest Spanish artist did not dare to formu- late ; if, indeed, we except El Greco, Velazquez, and, of course, Goya ; painters who belong by their genius to the world and not to Spain. The Church inspired the painter and purchased his pictures ; they paid the piper and they called the tune. The paintings were designed to decorate churches and religious houses, and they were executed in the spirit of the purpose they were to serve. The sculptors carved and painted with superstitious reverence their marble and wooden saints, which, in those days, were treated as if they were living gods, having their own attendants to wash, dress, and wait upon them. Richard Ford tells us that " No one is allowed to undress the Paso or Sagrada images of the Virgin. Such images, like queens, have their came- rera mayor, their mistress of the robes, and their boudoir, or camerin, where their toilet is made. This duty has now devolved on venerable single ladies, and thus has become a term of reproach, ha quedada para vestio imagines, ' she has gone to dress the images ' ; but the making and embroidering the superb dresses of the Virgin still afford constant occupa- tion to the wealthy and devout, and is one reason why this Moorish manufacture still thrives pre-eminently in Spain." From this it will be seen that sculpture, even more than painting, existed only as a servant of the Church, and in Spain these two arts have ever 26 MURILLO been more closely allied than in any other country in Europe. It will, moreover, be observed that the charac- teristics of Spanish art follow the characteristics of the Spanish people. Painting is grave and ascetic, dark, nay, almost lurid, while this gloom is broken, at times, by outbursts of florid senti- ment, of which Murillo's art gives us the finest example : and this art is invariably truthful, even to the fulness of realism. In Spanish pictures the saints are represented as persons of flesh and blood, the divinities are entirely human ; the ideal has no existence in these canvases. Murillo's beauty is the beauty of his model ; his saints are women of Seville ; and even the Divine members of the Trinity were studied in the deep shadows of the Giralda. Again, Spanish painting was not only without any ascertainable love of the beautiful considered as a cult, but it was uninspired by poetry. Painting was the foster-child of the Church, poetry was its bane and its abhorrence. The poets of Spain, so far as they dared, emanci- pated themselves from the narrowing influence of the priesthood, but the painters willingly confided themselves and their art into the hands of the Church. As Mr. Arthur Symons remarks, in an article on " The Painters of Seville " (Fortnightly MURILLO 27 Review, January, 1901) : — " Spanish art, before Velazquez discovered the world, is an art made for churches and convents, to the glory of God, never to the glory of earth. In other countries, men have painted the Virgin and the saints, for patrons, and because the subject was set them ; sometimes piously, and in the spirit of the Church ; but more often after some ' profane ' fashion of their own, as an excuse for the august or mournful or simple human presence of beauty. But in Spain pictures painted for churches are pictures painted by those to whom God is more than beauty, and life more than one of its accidents. The visible world is not a divine plaything to them. It is the abode of human life — human life is a short way leading to the grave." The sobriety of imagination which distin- guish the works of the Spanish painters is mainly to be attributed to the restraining influence of the Inquisition. Palomino quotes a decree issued by that tribunal forbidding the making or exposing of immodest paintings and sculptures on pain of excommunication, a fine of fifteen hundred ducats, and a year's exile. The proverbial gravity of the Spanish people has already been quoted as another cause of the severity and decency of Spanish art, and yet a third and very important 28 MURILLO cause was the sincerity with which the artist re- garded his caUing as a servant of the Church. " We Protestants," writes Sir William Stirling-Maxwell, " to whom religious knowledge comes through another and a better channel, are scarcely capable of appreciating the full importance of the Spanish artist's functions. The great Bible, chained in the days of King Edward VI. to the parish lectern, silenced for us the eloquence of the altar-piece. But to the simple Catholic of Spain, the music of his choir and the pic- tures of his ancient shrines stood in the place of the theological dogmas which whetted and vexed the intellect of the Pro- testant peasant of the north. . . . The Spanish painter well understood the dignity of his task, and not seldom applied himself to it with a zealous fervour worthy of the holiest friar. Like Fra Angelico at the dawn of Italian painting, Vicente Joanes was wont to prepare himself for a new work by means of prayer and fasting and the Holy Eucharist. The life of Luis de Vargas was as pure as his style ; he was accustomed to discipline his body with the scourge, and, like Charles V., he kept by his bedside a coffin in which he would lie down to meditate on death." The union between rehgion and painting during this period, as has been briefly noted, was made the more complete by this acquiescence of the artist in the conditions imposed upon him. Many painters took the priestly vows, and many priests expressed themselves in paint. There were few religious houses that did not possess, at one time or another, an inmate with some skill or ambition as an artist, and it is not surprising to find that MURILLO 29 much learning and ingenuity were exercised in the compilation of rules for the representation of sacred subjects and personages. The most com- plete code of sacro-pictorial law is, perhaps, that of Interian de Ayala, which was not, how- ever, published until the race of painters, for whose guidance it was designed, was nearly ex- tinct. This work, it does not amaze one to dis- cover, is a fine specimen of pompous and prosy trifling. For example, several pages are devoted to the castigation of those unorthodox painters who draw the Cross of Calvary like a T instead of in the ordinary Latin form. Then another ques- tion is anxiously debated — of the Marys at the Sepulchre on the morning of the Resurrection — whether two angels or only one should be seated on the stone which has been rolled away. Again, the right of the devil to his horns and tail under- goes a strict examination, of which the result is that the first are fairly fixed on his head on the authority of a vision of Santa Teresa, and the second is allowed as being a probable, if not exactly proven, appendage of the fallen angel. As was only to be expected, any unnecessary display of the nude figure was strongly reprobated by the severe patrons in the period of Spain's artistic eminence. Ayala censures those artists 30 MURILLO who expose the feet of their Madonnas. The Austrian princes, descended from Charles V., were all of them rigid formalists in religion, and Philip II. and Philip IV. threw the weight of their in- fluence into the scale against licence of the pencil. Richard Cumberland declares, in his " Anec- dotes," that the Spanish Charles II. permitted some foolish monks of the Escorial to employ Luca Giordano in letting down the robe of Titian's St. Margaret, because she slew her dragon, to their thinking, with a too free exposure of her leg. Even now the series of copies by Rubens of Titian's " Loves of the Gods " are condemned to a cellar in the Prado, as a last sacrifice to this austere prudery. Francisco Pacheco, remembered as the trainer and father-in-law of Diego Velazquez more than by his own pictures, was nevertheless distin- guished by a knowledge of art so much greater than the genius of his accomplishment. In his much-quoted " Art of Painting," we find many passages that illustrate the overpowering serious- ness which at all times governed Spanish art. Note, for instance, his strictures on Michael Angelo's Last Judgment, introduced as illustrat- ing his views, quoted by Sir E. Head in his " Handbook of Spanish Painting." He objects MURILLO 31 to angels without wings, and saints without clothes ; also to the damned being in the air, because, being without the power of grace, they could not leave the solid earth — criticisms which have a quaint and manifest propriety from the orthodox point of view. And when he treats of the Virgin Mary, his directions are supported by similar reasons : her feet are not, on any account, to be visible. This rule was strictly observed by Murillo, as his pictures prove. Further, Pacheco clearly enunciates how the incidents of her life are to be treated. For example, she is to be dressed in blue and white in the Immaculate Conception — a peculiarly Spanish subject — and so we find her in the great works painted by Murillo — Esteban Murillo, the well-beloved — for the brown-frocked friars of St. Francis. The reason given for this is conclusive ; the Blessed Virgin was so dressed when she appeared to Dofia Beatrix de Silva, a Portuguese nun, who founded the order that bore her name. Students, by this counsel, are not to study the nude; always, in regard to the female form, they must see only the hands and faces of their relatives or honourable ladies when painting the saints. Stirling-Maxwell contends that if Velazquez and Murillo have not equalled the achievements of 32 MURILLO Titian and Vandyck as portrait artists, it does not follow that the Spaniards were their inferiors in genius, but only that the fields of their famous rivals were less restricted. The Senate of Venice, and the splendid throngs of the imperial court, the Lomellini and Brignoli of Genoa, and the Herberts and Howards of England, afforded better models of manly beauty than the degenerating nobility of the court of Philip IV., and the clergy and gentry of Seville. But the Spanish painters were even more hampered when it came to the portrayal of the aristocratic beauties of the period, which has been termed the highest touch-stone of skill. Jealous husbands are not the most sympathetic patrons of portrait painters, and Velazquez and Murillo lived in an age when the nobles cared not to set oif to public admiration the charms of their womenkind. Moreover, the beauties of the seven- teenth century were robed in the most unsightly costumes, and the fairest forms were disguised in stiff, long-waisted corsets and monstrous hoops. Luxuriant tresses, as we are told by Madame d'Aulnoy, were twisted, plaited, and plastered into such shape that the fair head that bore them resembled the top of a mushroom ; or were curled and bushed out into an amplitude of frizzle that rivalled the cauliflower wig of an abbe. But worse MURILLO 33 even than the hideous costumes and the unsightly way of dressing the hair was the abomination of rouge which fashion imposed : not only were the cheeks tinged, but foreheads, ears and chins ; it was smeared even on the shoulders, and on the hands. The very nymphs and goddesses which figured among the statues on the terrace of the royal palace of Madrid had their marble cheeks and bosoms plastered with carmine. This perver- sion of taste at the toilet not only destroyed the complexions of the court beauties, but — what is more distressing to lovers of art — disfigured the female portraits of Spain's greatest painters. D III. But with this brief explanatory survey of the conditions of the period let us back to the subject of our sketch. In the early years of his success Murillo painted assiduously, and many of his canvases of this period are in the Madrid Gallery. They retain the severity and the dark colours of his first manner, the outlines are distinct, and the light and shadow are extremely well handled. This estilo frio of Murillo is the first of the styles into which it is usual to divide the painter's artistic expression. But shortly after his marriage this manner gave place to the estilo calido, or warm style. A picture of " Our Lady of the Concep- tion " — hung in the Franciscan convent among the masterpieces of the first manner — was the earliest work in this second manner noticed by Cean Bermudez. It was painted in 1652. It reveals the change in the painter's devel- opment in its outlines, which have become softer and rounder ; in its background, which has in- creased in depth of atmospheric effect ; and in its colouring, which has gained in transparency. As MURILLO 35 Reynolds, borrowing the ancient criticism passed by Euphranor on the Theseus of Parrhasius, re- marked that the nymphs of Barroccio and Rubens appear to have been fed upon roses, so Murillo's flesh tints now seem to have been painted, in the phrase of a Spanish critic, con sangre y leche — with blood and milk. In the four pictures commis- sioned in 1656 for the renovated church of Sta. Maria la Blanca, Murillo entered upon his third or vapoury manner {el vaporoso), in which the out- lines are lost in the light and shade, as they are in the rounded forms of nature. The pictures of this distinctive style, which is full of that glow and emotion and witchery which made him the adored of the Sevillians, are peopled with those grace- fully-imagined saints and virgins and angels — sweet, affected in pose, and ultra-ethereal — and made glorious by vaporous yellows, and cool greys, and sunlit flesh-tones that melt in the mystic lights. Personal taste counts for much in the whole field of art, and nowhere more so than in colour, and, whatever may be the estimate of modem criticism with reference to Murillo's accomplish- ment, it was this ability to suggest the trans- parencies of vapour on canvas, to incarnate air, that won the adulation of his contemporaries. 36 MURILLO But atmosphere in painting soon becomes a trick, even one which is calculated to turn to a vice rather than a virtue in weak hands. Cer- tainly Murillo had originality, and his personal quality, if Spanish or rather Andalusian, is very definite. The emotion in these pictures is the extravagant emotion of Spain as it turns to religion, only here the extravagance is merged in sweetness. His power to express grey grounds and cool distances, and yet preserve colour and warmth, has been admirably noted by M. Blanc : "II en conserva de plus un excellent ton gris qui ordinairement sert de fond de Velazquez, ou la gravite des personnages vetus de noir se combine si heureusement avec ce fond tranquille et froid. Mais que dis-je ? Les tons froids de I'Espagne sont encore des tons chauds." To these three divisions of style under which Murillo's work is usually classified, C. Gasquoine Hartley (" A Record of Spanish Painting ") suggests a new division — "... that depends upon the thought of the work rather than upon the manner of rendering — one that reverses the order, and places the early and more truthful work first in importance. All the initial religious pieces, and the genre paintings, may be tabulated as natural work tinged with the unreal. From the hovering between realism and emotion, Murillo's manner gradually changed, until the natural was MURILLO 37 mingled with the unreal and it becomes difficult to differen- tiate between the ideal and the fact. In his last work the natural was lost in the unreal and all trace of direct rendering of nature faded in mystic emotion." But the writer admits that the small group of Murillo's portraits cannot be included in this classification. A likeness of Archbishop Urbina, executed prior to his visit to Madrid for the monks of the Franciscan convent, is the earliest portrait of which we have any record. Sir Edmund Head says of it, " that the execution is hard, but the head has considerable power." Very few of Murillo's likenesses are to be seen outside Spain. Many critics consider that they constitute his finest and truest work, for in them he lost his instinct for posing his model, and gave us a simple render- ing of his sitter. But, unfortunately, his technical abihty seems to fail him in these very portraits ; and here we find his touch less sure. In the great sacristy of Seville Cathedral are his portraits of " St. Leander " and " St. Isidore " ; the former is a likeness of Alonso de Herrera, the leader of the Cathedral choir ; the latter of the licentiate, Juan Lopez Talaban. Both are good pieces of sincere work. The figures, although somewhat short, are simply posed and well placed upon the canvas, while here the technique is more 38 MURILLO careful, and in every detail reveals more strength, and we seem to glean a suggestion, as it were, of what Murillo might have done under other and more favourable circumstances. Of these two portraits, Carl Justi writes : " We are struck by the fact that their individual truthfulness is purer and more free from the conventional pattern, than the work of many highly-esteemed portrait painters of the century." In the Prado are several effective portraits, including that of Father Cabanillas, a bare- footed friar, dressed in the habit of his order ; a woman spinning ; and a Gallician woman counting money. Then there are a few portraits in private collections, notably that of the beautiful woman, supposed to have been the mistress of Murillo. The Louvre has two portraits, one of the poet Quevedo, and the second that of Due d'Osuna : while the Buda-Pesth Gallery has a likeness of a man — long supposed to be the portrait of the painter. But there are several portraits of Murillo painted by himself ; one, the earliest, was bequeathed by him to his children. The head is painted with a modishness, characteristic of the age ; we see Murillo the painter in early man- hood, gentle and thoughtful, though, may be, the thought is not very deep ; the lips are firm, the MURILLO 39 keen eyes intelligent, and the brow is low and broad. The face boasts none of the beauty of feature and courtly air which greet us in the pic- tures of Velazquez, but the countenance is in keeping with Murillo's genius ; it bears the stamp of that piety and conscious humanity which one finds in all his work. At the request of his children, Murillo painted, at a later date, a second portrait, in which we see him a somewhat care-worn man of middle age. The original picture is in the col- lection of Earl Spencer, at Althorp ; the portrait in the Madrid Gallery is a copy by his pupU Miguel de Tobar. Still another portrait of the painter, a three-quarter length, would seem to be an enlarged repetition of the earlier picture of Murillo. Then Don Lopez Cepero has in Seville, an unfinished portrait-head of the painter, which, by the possessor at least, is believed to be the last por- trait executed by the painter himself. In all the characteristics of. Murillo — in his genius and in his limitations, in his apparent affectations as well as in his palpable truths — we know that he was genuine and sincere, though always self-satisfied. His affectations are merely a part of his nature, his environment, his age. He is local in his conceptions because by birth and mode of life he was a provincial — he saw, felt. 40 MURILLO thought, and painted in the spirit of Andalusia. This great and dominant fact must never be lost sight of in studying the pictures and purposes of Murillo. His treatment of his subjects and his conception of religion belonged not to the world, nor could the lesson they preached have any in- fluence upon posterity — they were inspired by, and belonged to Andalusian Spain of the 17th century. While the mastery of his execution and the charm of his colouring will command ad- miration and homage so long as his canvases endure, his works beside those of Velazquez, of Rubens, of Titian, and others, whose masterpieces challenge his achievement in the Prado Gallery of Madrid are, by many, regarded as pictures of a fashion in art that is past, their inspiration marred by their triviality and sentiment. In the religious pictures of Murillo — those materialised expressions of Spanish Catholicism — he is seen as a good showman and a devout servan: of the Church. Neither his views of life no: of religion are universal. Murillo reveals to us the Andalusian habit of life and the monkish view of religion, both idealised, but strictly local ; cften beautiful in technique, but, even here, the gjft is facility rather than great achievement, and, to our modem ideas, much, at any rate, of his art is MURILLO 41 destitute of message. In his day he was adored, and in his own country he will always stand supreme. He represented for the people of Andalusia their saintly legends in a manner which brought the story and the moral straight home to their hearts. He attuned all his work to the sensual, emotional spirit of Southern Spain. He felt with the heart of the people, and they saw with the eyes of Murillo. His message to Andalusia could not fail — he is, and will always be, their favourite painter. The genius of ancient art — all that is com- prehended by artists under the name of the antique — was to Murillo " a spring shut up and a fountain sealed." He had left Madrid long before Velazquez had brought his collection of casts and marbles to the Alcazar. All his knowledge of Pagan art must have been gleaned in the Alcala gallery, or at second-hand from Italian pictures. Athenian sculpture of the age of Pericles, there- fore, had, directly at least, no more to do with the formation of his taste than Mexican painting at the period of Montezuma. All his ideas were of home growth ; his mode of expression was purely national and Spanish ; his model was nature as it existed in and around Seville. As a landscape painter Murillo often surprises us, especially in his use of colour, and here and 42 MURILLO there we are charmed and held by some effect not often realised by the Spanish painters, always weak in landscapes ; excepting of course, Velazquez, who here, as in all other branches of his art, stands alone among his contemporaries. And it must not be forgotten that Murillo's natural gift was great ; he was possessed of facihty almost to extravagance, and self-satisfaction— no mean equipments towards achievement ; and, had he lived in an atmosphere of deeper sincerity and greater intellectual activity, it is probable his work would have gained those qualities we miss. As Mr. Ricketts has pointed out, he might have produced pictures that would have equalled those of Andrea del Sarto and Fra Bartolommeo. "Give Murillo his facihty and self-assurance, place him under different circumstances, and I think he would have ranked with these painlers ; " is the estimate of this sane and scholarly critic. What, then, is the essential fault of Murillo's art ?— it is an art that has no restraint. There is in it none of the selection which hmits, fccuses, and thereby gains artistic truth. He strove, as it has been written, to unite the actual with the ideal, and to express thoughts beyond the power 3f his own inspiration. The decorative simplicity that governs all great art is wanting in his work He MURILLO 43 poses his figures in attitudes which might be natural as passing movements, but the result is affectation when those postures are imprisoned upon the canvas. His figures are Andalusian men and women, but they are studied into unreality. In spite of all their charm, his Virgin, his Saints, are always posed, even his beggar boys have the same fault, and their rags are more picturesque than true. The very animals in his pictures are painted in arranged positions. Every detail of scene and atmosphere is emotionally interpreted. Murillo's realism was not the actuality of Velaz- quez and Zurbaran ; he was not content simply to record what he saw. Instead, he painted what the Church had taught him men ought to see. Yet to reaUse that his message is not entirely dead to this generation, that the calm and sweet, yet passionate, piety of his Spanish nature, which he put into his pictures, still has power to draw a tribute of emotion and love from the heart of the modern critic, listen to the appreciation of that susceptible, fervent writer, Edmondo de Amicis : — " Murillo is not only a great painter," writes Amicis, " but has a great soul ; is more than a glory ; is. in fact, an object of affection for Spain ; he is more than a sovereign master of the beautiful, he is a benefactor, one who inspires good actions, and a lovely image which is once found in his canvases, is 44 MURILLO borne in one's heart throughout life, with a feeling of gratitude and religious devotion. He is one of those men of whom an indescribable prophetic sentiment tells us that we shall see them again ; that the next meeting with them is due to us like some prize ; that they cannot have disappeared for ever, they are still in some place ; that their life has only been like a flash of inextinguishable light, which must appear once more in all its splendour to the eyes of mortals. "In art Velazquez is an eagle : Murillo an angel. We admire the former and adore the latter. His canvases make him known as if he had lived with us. He was handsome, good, and pious ; many knew not where to touch him ; around his crown of glory he bore one of love. He was born to paint the sky. Fate had given him a peaceful and serene genius, which bore him heavenward on the wings of a placid inspiration ; and yet his most admirable pictures breathe an air of modest sweetness, which inspires sympathy and affection even before wonder. A simple and noble elegance of outline, an expression full of vivacity and grace, an ineffable harmony of colour are the points which strike one at first sight, but the longer one looks at them, the more one discovers in them, and astonishment is transformed, little by little, into a sweet feel- ing of gladness. His saints have a benign expression that cheers and consoles one ; his angels, whom he groups with a marvellous mastery, make one's lips tremble with a desire to kiss them ; his virgins, clothed in white and enveloped in their blue mantles, with their great black eyes, their folded hands so willowy, slight, and aerial in appearance, make one's heart tremble with sweetness, and one's eyes fill with tears. He combines the truth of Velazquez with the vigorous effects of Ribera, the harmonious transparency of Titian, and the brilliant vivacity of Rubens." One of the best examples of the first manner of MURILLO 45 Murillo, and the most natural of all his Holy Families, is the one known as " Del Pajarito " — " The Little Bird." The simplicity of the scene constitutes its enduring charm. There is a sus- picion of affectation in the pose of the dog and in the gesture of Joseph's hand, but the whole con- ception is graceful, simple, and restrained. Mary is sitting at her spinning-wheel in the background, Joseph is in partial shadow, and, in the full light, leaning baby-like against Joseph's knee, is the sweet and innocent figure of the little Christ. The colouring is rich and the paint is excellently handled. The picture of " Rebecca and Eleazer " is admirable in its draughtsmanship, but the colouring is hard and dark. In the " Adoration of the Shepherds " the colour is exceptionally fine, but again there is a distinct suggestion of weakness in the pose of the figures. A picture of the " Virgin with the Infant Jesus on her Knee," two early conceptions of Christ, some portraits of different saints, and a picture of San Fernando, King of Spain, are representative examples of this period of the painter's growth. The picture of the Virgin in the Museo of Seville, which is treated wholly in the realistic spirit, was probably painted before he went to Madrid ; and the three studies in the Prado, representing " San Ildefenso 46 MURILLO receiving the Sacerdotal Vestments from the Hands of the Virgin," " San Bernardo," and " San Geronimo kneeUng in his Grotto," betiay striking evidence of the influence of Velazquez and Ribera. Murillo won the favour of the great populace less by the technical excellence of his drawings than by the homely realism with which he treated his sub- jects. He amazed and delighted his Andalusian admirers by reflecting the images of themselves on his canvases. Until his advent in Seville, Pacheco, Herrera and Valdes Leal had accustomed the people to gaze on impossible saints and con- ventional gods, and to accept their vapid manrer and flat, Hfeless style as the ideal in art, while the austere realism of Zurbaran was admired tut not adored. But Murillo was to depict saints as men, to reveal Palestine as a province of Spain, and to people his Spanish Holy-land with Andalusian disciples and apostles. His Eastern backgrounds were taken from familiar Spanish landscapes, he surrounded scriptural events with a local atmosphere, he dressed his characters in the costumes of his own country, and over all this naturalism he cast the glamour of a strong and fervent, though it must be confessed, almcst always trivial, emotion. MURILLO 47 With Murillo — so different from the case of his great countryman, Cervantes — popularity spelt prosperity. While the public were loud in his praise, priors and noble patrons were overwhelm- ing him with commissions, and in 1648 his worldly circumstances were so secure that he was ac- cepted as the husband of a rich and noble lady. Of Doiia Beatriz de Cabrera y Sotomayor, whom he married in that year, we know little beyond the fact that she possessed property at Pilas, a village situated five leagues from Seville. That she made him a discreet and dutiful wife is generally ac- cepted, and there is certainly no evidence to the contrary. There is a kind of legend that Murillo first met her at Pilas, where he was painting an altar-piece for the Church of San Geronimo. The story alleges tha.t he wooed the lady by painting her as an angel in that composition. But it is extremely doubtful whether the painter employed his wife as a model in any of his pictures. Murillo appears to have had great fondness for his models, and he reproduces the same faces as saints, angels, or beggar-boys with unfailing persistence ; but we cannot, with any certainty, recognise Dona Beatriz in any of his compositions. One of his favourite models is said to have been the son of Sebastian Gomez, the painter's Mulatto 48 MURILLO attendant, who profited so well by the tuition he acquired in the studio that he was able to finish the head of a Madonna that Murillo was prevented from completing. In appreciation of his skill, the artist gave the slave his freedom. The juvenile Gomez is immortalised in the head of the " Boy looking out of Window " in the English National Gallery, and he is reproduced in other pictures by Murillo as an angel, a fruit-seller, and a figure in a crowd. It is somewhat significant to note in this connec- tion, that the artist exercised but little invention in the posing and grouping of his religious compositions. The majority of his saintly visions are realised in a set, unvaried style. The figures are the same, the posing is the same ; the same treatment is common to all. Always Murillo was satisfied with results easily gained. And for this reason, possibly, while his pictures are dramatic, the conception appears to be a mere sentiment rather than inspiration by any fine emotion. Though remarkably equal in merit, they are weak, with a tendency towards triviality ; even the technique is rarely interesting, the figures are blurred in luminous vapour ; and the colour is luscious even to satiety. Murillo's marriage was the means of enlarging MURILLO 49 the sphere of his hospitahty. His house now be- came the resort of the brethren of his craft and of the most cultured men in Seville. But the artist, instead of Hmiting his out-put, devoted himself to the production of pictures with unabated, self- assured industry and enthusiasm. As his sacred legends were multiplied, and found their way into the cathedral and the various religious houses of the city, he gradually lost the realistic method he had acquired in Madrid, and surrendered himself to the emotionaHsm of his Spanish religious temperament. His figures took on a spiritual exaltation, their attitudes became picturesquely unreal, his outlines lost their strength and dis- tinctness, and his colours acquired the tones of melting transparency which characterised his later style. One of the earliest examples in this second manner, specially praised by Cean Bermudez, is " Our Lady of the Conception," in which the sainted figure is represented with a friar seated, and writing, at her feet. This picture was exe- cuted in 1652 for the Brotherhood of the True Cross, who paid the artist 2,500 reals for the pic- ture. Some three years later he painted for the Chapter of the Cathedral another large canvas, " The Nativity of the Blessed Virgin," now in 50 MURILLO the Louvre, which is regarded as one of the most pleasing examples of Murillo's second style. The smaU oil-sketch of this subject in our National Gallery is catalogued as the painter's study for the life-size picture, but is now thought to be a clever copy by a French artist. The composition of the picture has been declared to be beyond criticism. In the foreground the new-born babe is being dressed by a graceful group of women and angels, and in the background St. Anne is depicted in bed, with figures bending over her. A pleasant landscape closes the scene, and a cluster of joyous cherubs hover above the holy babe. The bare left arm of one of the ministering maidens was, by reason of its perfect round- ness of form and beauty of colour, the envy of the ladies of Seville. The public admiration it excited has caused the limb to be quoted as the rival of the leg of Adam in the famous picture " La Generacion " by Luis de Vargas. But the most celebrated picture in this second manner of Murillo, which still hangs in the chapter of the baptistery of the Cathedral, is the " Visit of the Holy Child to St. Anthony of Padua "—a canvas which has always been greatly venerated in Seville. In the picture the shaven, grey-f rocked Saint, kneeling near a table, gazes rapturously aloft MURILLO 51 at a vision of the naked infant Jesus, who is descending to earth in a golden flood of glory surrounded by a garland of graceful forms and beautiful cherub faces. Palomino declares that the table, which bears a vase containing white liHes, and the arch, on the left of the picture, disclosing the architectural perspective of the cloister, were painted in by Valdes Leal, but the story is regarded as extremely improbable. For this picture, which was painted in 1656, the artist was paid the sum of 10,000 reals. Despite the high esteem in which it is held in Seville, the picture, judged by modern standards, must be described as a mysti- cal conception, lacking in simplicity and impres- siveness. Compared with the truthful simphcity of the Child in " Del Pajarito," the infant Saviour is a theatrical little angel, and his pose in the sky is affected and unnatural ; but the weakness of the composition is redeemed by the colouring, which is fine and glowing. In 1874 the figure of the Saint was cut from the canvas; and although the abstracted portion was discovered in New York and cleverly replaced, the picture still bears traces of the injury. Of this picture of " St. Anthony of Padua " the story is told, and implicitly believed in Seville, that the Duke of Wellington — Captain Widdrington in 52 MURILLO his "Spain and the Spaniards in 1843 " refers to him as " a lord " — had declared himself ready to give £40,000 for the work, M. Viardot, in his Musees D'Espagne, gives the tale on reverend authority, in the following passage : " Une chanoine qui avait bien voulu me servir de cicerone, ma raconta qu' apres la retraite de Francais, en 1813, le Due de Wellington avait offert d'acheter ce tableau pour I'Angleterre en le couvrant d'onces d'or ; mais I'Angleterre a garde son or, et Seville le chef- d'ceuvre de son peintre." The canvas is about 15 feet square, which, allowing each golden ounce to be worth £3 6s., and to cover a square of inches brings the Duke's offer to over £47,500, It is interesting, if not very important, that the evidences of weakness and mannerism which this picture betrays pass unnoticed by John Lomas, a critic, who, as will be noticed a little later, could be quite outspoken on the subject of the short- comings of Murillo. But of "St. Anthony of Padua " he says, " In conception and composi- tion, drawing and colouring, this superb picture is unexceptionable, while the smallest accessories are painted with wonderful care. And, although there is something of the inevitable Murillo pretti- ness about the infant Christ, there is at the same time an unwonted dignity and protecting power, MURILLO 53 a fine divinity ; while the kneehng figure is quite living in its expression of yearning dependency and trustfulness." In 1656 the small church of Sta. Maria la Blanca was renovated, and Murillo's powerful friend and patron, the Canon Don Justino Neve y Yevenes, commissioned the artist to paint for this church four large pictures of a semi-circular form, two for the nave and one for each of the lateral aisles. These four pictures, which M. Viardot has called "the miracles of Murillo," were carried away by the French and placed in the Louvre, where one of them, a " Virgin of the Conception " adored by churchmen and described by Stirling-Maxwell as one of the earliest of the painter's Conceptions, still remains. Of the others, two were happily rescued at the Peace, and now hang in the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid. These canvases, which are named respectively " The Dream " and " The Fulfilment," were designed to illustrate the history of the festival of Our Lady of the Snow. In the picture of " The Dream " we see the sleeping figures of the Roman Senator and his rich but childless wife ; while the Blessed Virgin, who has been adopted as their heir, is shown seated on a cloud and surrounded by a glory. The Virgin, according to the legend, is 54 MURILLO revealing to the sleepers her acceptance of their inheritance, on condition of their repairing to the Esquiline Hill and there erecting a church in her honour on a piece of ground which they would find covered with snow. This picture is particularly interesting as betraying the first evidence of the artist's third manner. In the companion picture, " The Fulfilment," the devout couple are relating their dream to the dignified, Titian-like Pontiff, Pope Liberius, and in the far distance a procession of priests, accompanied by a great press of people, is seen approaching the snow patch on the Esquiline Hill. A " Mater Dolorosa," a " St. John," and a " Last Supper " of Murillo, the latter painted in the early style, were at one time in the possession of the church of Sta. Maria la Blanca ; to-day, only the " Last Supper " graces its ancient walls. IV. Although it is difficult to trace in Spanish art the influence of the PubHc Academy of Art which Murillo planned in 1658, and established in Seville two years later, the scheme enlisted the warmest interest and personal attention of the artist during many of the best years of his life. The artists of Madrid, supported by the art-loving Philip IV., had vainly endeavoured, for many years, to surmount the difficulties besetting such a project ; and in Seville the conflicting jealousies of the rival painters, which were even more pronounced here than at the capital, offered a proportion- ately greater bar to success. But Murillo's heart was in the enterprise ; he remem- bered the disadvantages under which he had laboured in his own artistic beginnings, and his estimate of the importance of painting as an edu- cational and religious influence upon the people, nerved him to overcome all obstacles. By enlist- ing the sympathies of Valdes Leal and the younger Herrera he paved the way for the meeting of twenty-three of the leading artists of the city, who assembled on the iith of January, 1660, and 56 MURILLO drew up a constitution for the new society. Murillo and Herrera were elected to the two presidential chairs, and among the other chosen office-holders were Juan de Valdes Leal, Sebastian de Llanos y Valdes, Pedro Honorio de Palencia, Cornelius Schut and Ignacio Iriarte. The two presidents were to officiate on alternate weeks as director of studies and the guide, philosopher and friend to the students, and the other officers were to form the council of the president, and to superin- tend the clerical and financial details connected with the business side of the Academy. The working expenses were to be defrayed by the members of the society, whose liabilities were limited to a monthly subscription of six reals each, while the pupils were admitted on the most liberal terms. They were only asked to pay whatever they could afford, and to faithfully obey the few simple but strictly enforced rules. Each student, on admission, was to pronounce his orthodoxy in these words — "Praised be the most holy Sacra- ment, and the pure Conception of Our Lady " — to bind himself to refrain from swearing or loose talk, and to eschew all conversation on subjects not relating to the business of the school. Students were numerous from the first, but differences among the subscribing members led to MURILLO 57 many secessions and changes among the office- holders, and in the second year of the Academy's existence Murillo appears to have had sole control in the management of its affairs. But, after a time, the friction which produced these changes died out, and in 1673, in the last minute preserved in the original records printed by Cean Bermudez, it is stated that the meeting held on November 5th was attended by forty-three academicians and by their " most noble protector," Don Manuel de Guzman, who occupied that exalted station in suc- cession to the deceased Count of Arenales. While Murillo was actively interested in the direction of the Academy the institution flourished, but it is evident that after a while the jealousy of envious brethren of the craft inclined him to give fuller heed to the calls of his own studio. Yet even after he had withdrawn from active participation in the conduct of affairs, the academy continued to exist until his death, when, after a chequered career lasting for a score of years, the school was closed. Between 1668 and 1671 Murillo was engaged by the Chapter of Seville Cathedral to retouch the allegorical designs of Cespedes in the Chapter- room which was under repair, and to execute a full-length Virgin of the Conception and a series 58 MURILLO of eight oval half-length pictures of saints. Ponz finds the saints pleasing, yet of no great artistic merit ; while the Virgin, who is depicted with her orthodox escort of lovely cherubs, is described as a dark-haired and magnificent Madonna. About this time Murillo also painted for the sacristy of the Chapel de la Antigua the infants, Christ and St. John, and the " Repose of the Virgin." As these works were missing after the Peninsular War, it is supposed that they had the misfortune to excite the admiration of one or other of the French military collectors. About this time Murillo was employed by the Cathedral authorities to decorate the Capilla Real in honour of the canonization of St. Ferdinand III. The whole cathedral was adorned for this great ceremony, perhaps the greatest that ever took place in Seville, and the Capilla Real was apportioned to the city's most illustrious painter, for did it not shelter the body of the saint, which stiU lies stretched out in a silver shrine before the high altar. There is no record extant of the nature or scope of the decoration adopted on this occasion, but it is of interest to admirers of Murillo on account of the reference made to him in Don Fernando de la Torre Farfan's adulatory poem in honour of the new saint. Some idea of MURILLO 59 the relations which existed between the painter and the priests, and the deep respect in which he was held by the Church, is afforded us by the fact that in such a connection, and in such a poem, the reverend author should thus allude to the painter's work : " One dare scarcely trust one's eyes for fear one is looking at a phantom and not at a real thing. We are lost in wonder, when we gaze at the pictures, at the talent of our Bartolome Murillo, who here has created that which cannot be surpassed." The " Memorial of the Festivals held at Seville on the Canonisation of St. Ferdi- nand," in which this signal homage to the genius of the artist is preserved, was printed at the ex- pense of the Chapter of Seville for presents, and has been claimed to be one of the most beautiful books of Spanish local history. In the poem from which we have quoted, Don Fernando, after pro- claiming the renown of Murillo's name, and the " learning " of his pencil, and eulogising him as a " b'Ctter Titian," remarks of one of his delineations of -the Immaculate Conception, " that those who did. not know it had been painted by the great artist of Seville would suppose that it had its birth in Heaven." Such then was the esteem in which MuriUo was held in 1671, when the most glorious period of his 6o MURILLO career was still before him. During the three fol- lowing years he was to paint for the Hospital of Charity his series of eleven pictures, which have been described as the finest works of the master. In these, Stirhng-Maxwell finds evidence that the artist determined to leave to posterity an example of the variety of his style, and of the full compass and vigour of his genius. The project of restoring the forlorn and moulder- ing ruin of, the Hospital of San Jorge and its dila- pidated church, had its origin in the pious mind of Don Miguel Manara Vicentelo de Leca, knight of Calatrava — duellist, boon-companion, rake, roys- terer— who had abandoned a Hfe of profligacy to become a sincere pietist. He was born in 1626, and his conversion is the subject of several stories. One annahst has it that Manara, while stumbhng homewards after a night of carousal, saw a funeral procession approaching him. The priests and the usual torch-bearers accompanied the bier. Stepping up to the bearers the young man said : " Whose body is that which you are carrying ? " The reply was startling : " The body of Don Miguel de Mafiara." The prodigal reeled away, filled with horror ; for he had looked upon the corpse and recognised his own features. When the morning broke Manara was found insensible in a church: MURILLO 6i it was the turning point of his life. He became an ascetic, a devotee, and the patron^of|Murillo. Yet his portrait in the Sala del Cabildo^of|La Caridad — the man with the sad thin face — was executed, not by Murillo, but by Juan de Valdes. In 1661, the desolate shell of the building on the bank of the river, close to the Torre del Oro, attracted the attention of the regenerated knight of Calatrava, and he assumed the heavy responsibihty of raising the funds necessary to restore the hospital in a prosperous condition to the city. The first con- tribution he received towards the fulfilment of his self-imposed task was a gift of fifty crowns, the savings of a Ufetime, which a beggar named Luis, desired to devote to the service of God and the poor. On this slender foundation Mafiara com- menced his pious work, which was completed at the cost of over half a milHon ducats. He constructed a church, which boasts an interior more elegant than that of any other religious edifice in Seville, and a hospital with magnificent marble cloisters and spacious halls, dedicated to the necessities of " our masters and lords the poor." The "DubHn Review" narrates the following facts in connection with this institution of La Cari- dad which seem worthy of repetition here. Below- stairs are upwards of 100 beds and always 100 62 MURILLO patients, while above reside twelve " venerables," or aged infirm priests, in comfortable apartments. In each ward there is an altar where mass is regu- larly said ; and there is an outer hall opening on the street, with door left unbarred all night, where any beggar or poor wayfarer may find supper, light, and bed. In 1844 the confraternity for- warded, or assisted on their journeys, 165 poor people ; gave ecclesiastical burial to seventy, the number of deaths in the house having been forty- three ; carried 162 to the hospitals, and distri- buted clothes and alms to others ; and 17,398 large loaves of bread, besides abundance of meat, fruits, vegetables, chocolate, cakes, wines, &c., were consumed in the establishment. The altars of the church of San Jorge are among the richest in Spain ; its decorations included eleven of the finest canvases of Murillo. Three of these pictures, which still adorn the lateral altars, represent the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin, the Infant Saviour, and the Infant St. John; the remaining eight treat of appropriate Scriptural subjects. The names and prices paid for these eight compositions are as follow : — " Moses striking the Rock " . . . 13,300 reals " Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes " . . 15,975 " Charity of San Juan de Dios " and " St. ) Elizabeth of Hungary tending the Sick " J ^^'^40 .. MURILLO 63 " Abraham Receiving the three Angels," \ the " Return of the Prodigal," " Our Lord Healing the Paralytic," and " St. I 32,000 reals Peter released from Prison by the Angel 78,115 reals, or about ;^8oo Of these masterpieces the acquisitive Soult secured five ; four of which went into his own picture warehouse and the fifth he presented to the Louvre. The " St. Ehzabeth of Hungary " was happily recovered by the Spaniards, and is now in Madrid ; the " Release of St. Peter " is at the Her- mitage at St. Petersburg ; " Abraham " and the " Prodigal Son " are in the Duke of Sutherland's collection at Stafford House, and the " Healing of the Paralytic " is supposed to have passed, at the time of the sale of the Tomline collection, to the United States. Happily for La Caridad three compositions remain in their original positions, the " Moses," the " Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes," and the " Charity of St. John of God." The weight of critical opinion favours " The Charity of St. John of God " as the finest of the three pictures. The figures are strong and finely drawn, and the dark form of the sick man and the sober grey habit of his bearer are in marked con- trast to the luminous yellow drapery of the angel. 64 MURILLO and the celestial light which fills the canvas with shimmering colour. The " Moses " has its many admirers ; indeed, Stiriing-Maxwell holds that, as a composition, " this wonderful picture can scarcely be surpassed " ; but the coldness and hardness of the tones, and the imperfect blending of the many tints are conspicuous weaknesses. The same judicious critic finds the head of the patriarch noble and expressive, and the figure majestic and commanding, but to some the dignity of the figure of Moses is marred by a suggestion of affectation in the pose, and the groupings of the Andalusian Israelites may, by no great stretch of the imagination, have been superintended by a stage-manager. Wilkie — who, during his visit to Seville made a copy of the " Early Manhood " portrait of Murillo, which copy is now in the possession of the Earl of Leven — declared that, "Seeing their great reputation, these pictures would at first disappoint you. They are far from the eye, badly lighted, and much sunk in their shadows, and have in consequence a grey, nega- tive effect. The choice of the colour in the ' Moses ' is poor, and the chief figure wants relief. The great merit of the work Hes in the appearance of nature and truth which he has given to the wandering descendants of Israel." As a matter MURILLO 65 of fact, the whole conception lacks the dignity and artistic sincerity of all great compositions, while the same defects mar the inspiration of " The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes." The weakness of the figure of Christ, the awkward treatment of the two distinct crowds, and the want of a sus- tained harmony, leaves the spectator entirely unsatisfied. Most critics are agreed that " The Miracle " is not equal to its twin-picture " Moses," but some judges have praised it without stint. Among the latter is M. Thore, who has expressed his admiration of the composition in the following terms : — "Si le Christ a nourri cinq mille hommes avec cinq pains d'orge et deux poissons, Murillo a peint cinq mille hommes sur un espace de vingt- six pieds. En verite, il n'en manque pas un des cinq mille ; c'est une multitude inouie de femmes et d'enfants, de jeunes gens et de veillards, une ru6e de tetes et de bras qui se meuvent a I'aise, sans confusion, sans gene, sans tumulte. Tons contemplent le Christ au milieu de ses disciples, et le Christ benit les pains, et le miracle est op6r6 ! Magnifique enseignement de charite que le peintre a mag- nifiquement traduit." In the " St. Elizabeth," probably the most noted of all Murillo's pictures, the figures are simple, free from affectation of pose, and finely created ; and the expression of St. Elizabeth is grave, although the type is common place, and F 66 MURILLO without special interest. The execution through- out is particularly fine, and the lighting and colour are extremely good. When this picture was returned to Spain it was detained on some technical pretext at Madrid instead of being restored at once to La Caridad, and, as the result of this purposeful procrastination, it now hangs in the Prado Gallery in the capital. Of this picture, Mr. Charles Ricketts writes : " The painting, within its limitations tranquil and even solid (for Murillo), accents nothing, recalls nothing. Yet this picture is famous, and among his work it is deservedly so." It is greatly to be deplored that a cycle of pic- tures, such as these which Murillo painted for the Hospital of Charity at Seville, should have been broken up and its units distributed. The series was projected by Manara out of an abounding love for humanity, and the painter was inspired in his work by the same sympathy with the sorrows and sufferings of the people. The canvases told their story, and made their appeal on behalf of " our masters and lords the poor." As a series hanging in a palace of charity they fulfilled their mission ; but surrounded by foreign pictures, breathing an unsympathetic, if not an actively hostile, spirit, their lesson is lost. Moreover, the secondary in- MURILLO 67 terest in the seriee is destroyed by their dispersal, for it is now impossible to compare the relative merits of the several pictures. Cean Bermudez, who among writers is the only one who enjoyed the advantage of seeing this collection entire in the places and lights for which they were painted, awards the palm of artistic excellence to " The Prodigal " and " St. Elizabeth," and we of a later century can only echo the general verdict that " the most faulty is full of beauties that would do honour to any painter." When it is remembered that a large proportion of the revenue of the hospital was derived from the visitors who were attracted by these pictures of MuriUo, and who contributed liberally to the funds of the institution, it will be recognised that the French marshal's work of spoliation was a peculiarly cold-blooded piece of burglary. Indeed, the whole story of the long premeditated picture- stealing campaign of Soult fills one with rage and indignation. Spies preceded his army, disguised as travellers, and furnished with Cean Bermudez' "Dictionary," were thus able to track down the prey of plate and pictures. The aged prior of the Convent of Mercy at Seville told Richard Ford that he recognised, amongst Soult's myrmidons, one of these commis-voyageurs of rapine, to whom 68 MURILLO he himself shortly before had pointed out the very treasures which they were then about to seize. That a single picture, worth the carriage to France, was preserved to Seville, was no fault of the French general. Hundreds of canvases intended for ex- portation were left huddled together in the saloons of the Alcazar when the army evacuated the city. To strip dark churches and convents, it may be said, was often to rescue fine works of art from oblivion, or from the decay caused by monkish neglect ; whereas to despoil Manara's church of its pictures, was, as Stirling-Maxwell protests, to rob not merely Seville of glorious heirlooms, but the poor of the charity of strangers whom these pictures attracted to the hospital. The same author adds, with biting cynicism : "In France, finance ministers have frequently proved them- selves * smart men ' on 'Change. Soult enjoys the rarer distinction of having turned his marshal's baton into the hammer of an auctioneer, and the War Office into a warehouse for stolen pictures." A few of Murillo's stolen canvases found their way to Holland ; and in the "Art Union" of June, 1841, a story is told of an altar-piece painted by the Master, and turned to excellent account by a society of Flemish friars. A credulous Briton came, saw, and acquired this picture for a considerable MURILLO 69 sum, and, by the desire of the vendors, affixed his seal and signature to the back of the canvas. In due time it followed him to England, and became the pride of his collection. But, passing through Belgium some years afterwards, the purchaser turned aside to visit his friends the monks, and was surprised to find his acquisition, smiling in all its original brightness, on the wall where he had been first attracted by its beauty. The truth was that the good fathers always kept under the original canvas an excellent copy, which they sold in the manner above related to any rash collector whom Providence directed to their cloisters. V. While he was still engaged in completing his pictures for the Hospital of Charity, Murillo must have been pondering the yet greater work he was to undertake for the Convent de los Capuchinos at the request of his old friends, the Franciscans. It was for the brown-frocked brotherhood that he had painted his first pictures on his return to Seville in 1645 '» ^'^^ although he was rewarded at the lowest rate of payment that could have been offered, he seems always to have retained a warm regard for his earliest patrons. The Capuchin convent, built upon the site of the monastery of St. Leander and the church of Sta. Rufina and Sta. Justa, outside the Carmona Gate of the City, was commenced in 1627. The artists, Herrera and Zurbaran, who would have been alive to take part in its pictorial adornment if the building had been proceeded with at a normal rate of progress, were dead before the chapel was completed in 1670. But MurUlo, now at the height of his achievement, was eager to accept the commission. For six years he laboured in this building, and during three MURILLO 71 of them, according to the unsupported statement of Mrs. O'Neill in her " Dictionary of Spanish Painters," he never left the convent. During that period — 1674 to 1680 — he executed upwards of twenty compositions. Nine of these adorned the high altar; they included the huge picture of the " Virgin granting to St. Francis the Jubilee of the Porciuncula," " Sta. Rufina and Sta. Justa," " St. John the Baptist in the Desert," " St. Joseph with the Infant Jesus," " St. Leander and St. Bonaventure," the three charming half- length canvases of " St. Anthony of Padua," " St. Felix of Cantalicio with the Virgin and Child," and the " Holy Kerchief of Sta. Veronica." On the altar stood a " Crucifixion," painted on a wooden cross. The lateral altars were enriched with the eight equally celebrated canvases : the " Annunci- ation of the Blessed Mary," the " Virgin with the dead Saviour in Her Arms," " St. Anthony of Padua with the Infant Christ," the " Virgin of the Conception," "St. Francis embracing the Crucified Redeemer," the " Nativity of Our Lord," the " Vision of St. Felix," and the " Charity of St. Thomas of Villanueva." In addition to various smaller compositions, the Convent also acquired another "Virgin of the Conception" of rare beauty, the " Guardian Angel," and two studies of the 72 MURILLO Archangel Michael. What pecuniary award the painter received for these pictures, which raised this otherwise unimportant little church into the greatest artistic treasure-house of Seville, we cannot tell. The Franciscans had little worldly wealth, and beyond their famous library of ecclesiastical folios, and the works with which Murillo enriched them above any other brother- hood in Spain, they were poor indeed. The huge canvas of the " Virgin granting to St. Francis the Jubilee of the Porciuncula," in which we see the kneehng figure of the Saint bowing his head beneath the shower of red and white roses wherewith the attendant cherubim of the Saviour and the Virgin bless his pious austerity, has been restored and repainted so often that nothing remains but the outlines of Murillo, overlaid with modern pigments. The gem of the entire series, is the beautiful " Charity of St. Thomas of Villan- ueva," which Murillo was wont to call " his own " picture. Its subject afforded the sharp contrasts that appealed to his native dramatic instinct. The good St. Thomas, beloved of Murillo as he was by the poor of Seville, stands at the door of his cathedral administering alms. The prelate is robed in black, with his white mitre upon his head ; at his feet rests a filthy beggar, while other male and MURILLO 73 female mendicants are grouped in the foreground. Despite their dirt and their rags, they are posed with a fine sense of the picturesque, and the small urchin who exults over the pieces of money which have fallen to his share, is a typical Murillo beggar-boy. Of this picture Mr. Arthur Symons writes : — " In such a picture as his own favourite St. Thomas of Villanueva giving alms, he has created for us on the canvas a supreme embodi- ment of what is so large a part of religion in Spain, the grace and virtue of alms-giving, with the whole sympathetic contrast of Spanish life emphasised sharply in the admirable, pitying grace of the saints, and the swarming misery of the beggars." The piety and benevolence of St. Thomas were exalted several times by the pencil of Murillo — one picture of the Saint is in the collection of Lord Ashburton, and another is included in the Wallace collection — but his most elaborate and important study of the worthy prelate was the one he painted for his friends, the Franciscans of Seville. The patron saints of Seville, Justa and Rufina, also inspired the painter to his highest flights of devout imagination. These Saints were the daughters of a potter Uving in the suburb of Triana where coarse earthenware is still made. During 74 MURILLO the Roman occupation of Seville they suffered martyrdom for their adherence to the Christian faith, and were canonised and made the saintly guardians of the city. During a terrible storm that wrought great havoc in Seville they were sup- posed to have saved the Giralda from destruction. In Murillo's composition they stand surrounded by the pots and palm branches with which tradi- tion has endowed them, supporting the fairy-like Arabian tower of the cathedral. The colouring is exquisitely dehcate, and the tones — ultramarine blues, and peach and pink shades and rich yellows — harmonise with the Seville brown, a rich red brown known as negro de hueso (dark bone) made of burnt bones saved from the olla. This brown, which is still manufactured in Seville, and is, indeed, one of the distinguishing features of the Sevillian school, lends an abundant mellowness to this picture, which may also have been tinted, as was Murillo's custom, with liquorice. The com- position which is in the Museum of Seville may be compared with the study of the same subject made by Francisco Goya which hangs in the cathedral. The one is the work of a good church- man and devotee, the other is the contemptuous challenge of a misanthrope. Goya selected for his purpose two well-known majas of Madrid. " I MURILLO 75 will cause the faithful to worship vice," was his grim and caustic comment. The picture of " St. Leander and St. Bonaven- ture " is spoiled by the somewhat commonplace appearance of the saints, but the arrangement of the white draperies is good. The two companion studies of St. Anthony with the Infant Christ, and the picture of the " Virgin revealing herself to St. Felix," are finer pictures. The two Immaculate Conceptions included in the Capuchin series are of unequal merit. Pictures which command admiration, both for their religious sentiment and for the greater strength of the figures, are the " St. John in the Desert," and the " St. Joseph with the Infant Jesus." In the representation of the " Nativity of Our Lord," which has been so highly extolled both by Cean Bermudez and by Ponz, the Virgin is perhaps the most beautiful of all Murillo's Madonnas. Her sweet face is alight with the reflected glory of the new-born Christ on her knees, and the ethereal Virgin is in contrast with the figure of St. Joseph and the surrounding shepherds, while it finds an affinity in the two ex- quisite cherubs hovering in dim space above the holy mother. The picture of the " Guardian Angel " illustrates the firmly-held doctrine preached by St. Isidore that every human soul is watched over 76 MURILLO by a celestial spirit, a dogma established by the warning which Christ addressed to His disciples, " Take heed how ye offend one of these little ones, for I say unto you that in Heaven their angels do always behold the face of My Father." The beauty of the child is enhanced by the transparent texture of his garment, and the figure of the angel with the rich yellow and purple of the robe and mantle, is as fine, perhaps, as anything Murillo has painted. The legend of "la Virgen de la Servilleta," the " Virgin of the Napkin," is connected with the small picture of the Virgin and the Infant Saviour, which once adorned the tabernacle of the Capuchin high-altar. It is not recorded either by Palomino, Ponz, Cean Bermudez, or any of the old writers on Spanish art ; but the story is given in " The Life of Murillo " by Davies ; and is implicitly beheved by aU good SeviUians. And it may be added that the incident gains some credibility from the size and shape of the small square canvas. Stirling-Maxwell relates the legend, which he heard from the keeper of the Museum in Seville ; it is quoted here in his words : — Murillo, whilst employed at the convent, had formed a friendship, it is said , with a lay brother, the cook of the fraternity, who attended MURILLO 77 to his wants and waited on him with pecuhar assiduity. At the conclusion of his labours, this Capuchin of the kitchen begged for some trifling memorial of his pencil. The painter was willing to comply, but had exhausted his stock of canvas. " Never mind," said the ready cook, " take this napkin," offering him one which Murillo had used at dinner. The good-natured artist accordingly went to work, and before evening he had con- verted the piece of coarse linen into a picture compared to which cloth of gold, or the finest tissue of the East would be accounted as " filthy dowlas." The Virgin has a face in which thought is happily blended with maidenly innocence ; and the Divine infant, with his deep earnest eyes, leans forward in her arms, struggling, as it were, almost out of the picture, as if to welcome the saintly carpenter home from his daily toil. The picture is coloured with a brilliancy which Murillo never excelled ; it glows with a golden light as if the sun were always shining on the canvas. Of all the pictures executed with so much loving care, and such a wealth of mature genius, not a solitary souvenir remains in the convent " de los Capuchinos." The dingy, desolated chapel now serves as a parish church, in which the visitor is shown a few monkish portraits that yet moulder in 78 MURILLO the sacristy, and the altar where the masterpieces of Murillo once hung. Before the dissolution of the convents the foolish monks had bartered away their immense " Porciuncula " for some modern daubs for their cloister. During the Peninsular War the pictures were sent to Gibraltar to save them from the rapacity of Soult, and they were only returned to Seville in 1814 after peace had been declared. Seventeen of these canvases now occupy one chamber of the Museum of the city, and include the " Sta. Rufina and Sta. Justa," " St. John in the Desert," and " St. Joseph with the Infant Christ," the " Nativity," " Sts. Leander and Bonaventure," the "St. Francis at the foot of the Cross," the two studies of " St. Anthony," the " St. Felix," the " St. Thomas of Villanueva," the two " Conceptions," and the " Virgin of the Nap- kin." It has been denied that Seville is the only place in which Murillo can be best studied and his genius fully appreciated, and writers have declared that the artist himself would have been content to be judged by his compositions which are now to be seen in the Madrid Gallery. Yet it must be ad- mitted that the full development of his utterance can be traced nowhere so well as in the Seville Gallery, and Mr. Arthur Symons hardly over- states the truth when he says : " Outside of MURILLO 79 Seville Murillo is an enigma." Here only can one compare the directness and simplicity of his early " Annunciation " with the three " Immacu- late Conceptions," in which, as one critic has described it, " an idealised Mary melts in ethereal mistiness." VI. MuRiLLO painted no fewer than twenty pictures on the subject of the Conception — the " darling dogma of the Spanish Church," and the unrivalled grace and feeling of his treatment has won for him the title of el pintor de las Concepdones. The worship of the Virgin Mother, though always appealing irresistibly to the religious heart of Spain, was not an official article of the Spanish Catholic faith until 1617, when, at the earnest instigation of Philip IV., a papal edict was issued declaring the immaculate nature of Mary. No dogma had ever been so readily accepted or so fervently believed in the Peninsula. According to a contemporary writer, " Spain flew into a frenzy of joy. Archbishop de Castro per- formed a magnificent service of Te Deum and thanksgiving in the Cathedral, and amidst the thunder of the organ and the choir, the roar of all the artillery on the walls and river, and the clanging of the bells in all the churches of Seville, swore to maintain and to defend the special doctrine which was held in that See in such particular esteem. No wonder that all the conventual houses vied with each other to obtain from Murillo, the special painter of purity and loveliness, representations of the Madonna exemplifying this great dogma. All the religious painters of the century sought to celebrate this triumph, to which tzisk Murillo bent the power and passion of his brush." MURILLO 8i The worship of Spain m Murillo's day was, in point of fact, practically centred in the adoration of the Virgin Mary — the different orders of monks venerated their respective founders and saints, but they were all united in their devotion to the Virgin. The rules for the guidance of painters in their treatment of the Mother of Jesus were strict, but within those limitations, the artist might lavish all the beauty and adoration that his soul could conceive and his brush could transcribe upon the canvas. Every painter in the kingdom was engaged in depicting the worshipped Virgin, but no one approached Murillo in clothing the favoured subject with that combination of naturalism and mysticism, which found its way direct to the heart of the Andalusian religionists. The Italians had portrayed Mary as a great lady in a mansion or a cloister; in his Annunciations, Murillo showed her amid humble domestic surroundings. In his Conceptions he assimilates feminine loveliness with virginal char- acter, but, by transforming her from an earthly mother to a spiritual being, he really threatens the very basis of the Biblical teaching. As pictures they are delightful, but they express only the Andalusian comprehension of the Virgin Mother ; and, it must be admitted, reveal an extraordinary G 82 MURILLO and strictly local development of Christian ortho- doxy. It has been said that the rules governing the portrayal of the Virgin were strict, and it is curious and interesting to glance at the directions which Pacheco, " the lawgiver of Sevillian art," laid down for the treatment of this all-important sub- ject. The idea of the holy " woman clothed with the sun and with the moon under her feet, and having upon her head a crown of twelve stars," is of course derived from the vision in the Apocalypse, but " in this gracefuUest of mysteries " it was precisely enjoined that " Our Lady is to be painted in the flower of her age, from twelve to thirteen years old, with sweet grave eyes, a nose and mouth of the most perfect form, rosy cheeks, and the finest streaming hair of golden hue ; in a word, with all the beauty that a pencil can express." Most people will regard the above directions as an answer to John Lomas's interrogatory : " What basis of belief has Murillo for representing Mary not as a real woman, but as a creature without weight, floating in an undescried region of air filled with infants fledged with insignificant coloured wings ?" In these Conceptions, Lomas declares, Murillo shows " as well as can be shown, both his per- MURILLO 83 fections and his shortcomings : his sunshiny luminosity, lacking depth ; his slavery to— not quite mastery of — colour ; his pretty conceptions of characters, Divine and human, which he lacked power either to raise to heaven or to make incar- nate." As a criticism of the technical excellence and the limitations of the artist's style, this judgment can be defended, but Mr. Lomas's pen- picture of a representative portrayal of the Virgin betrays his imperfect realisation of the religious feeling of Murillo's age and the laws laid down by Pacheco : — " Vested in blue and white," in the description of this critic, " as she appeared to Sister Beatrix de Silva, the drapery- flowing down so that all trace is lost of the limbs below the knees, and folded over the moon — which does not support her, but merely adorns the cloud round the region of her feet (if she has any) — about the size of a reaping-hook, she lays her hand upon her bosom, and looks up through a glory of thick yellow light, that seems to proceed from herself. Round her, innumerable cherubs, not the mystical winged heads of older painters, but infants quite natural (as is the treatment of the Virgin herself) with lovely carnations on their sturdy limbs. These are the zephyrs of Christian mythology that fill the upper air, fluttering round her, and giving her a presentiment of maternity ; some sitting on the more solid clouds approach- ing the dark below which belongs to the earth, and many above fading away into the golden mist behind her." Turning from this half-contemptuous general description of the composition of the Madonna 84 MURILLO pictures to the very full instructions of Pacheco, what do we find ? That Our Lady's eyes are to be turned to Heaven, and her arms are to be meekly folded across her bosom ; that the mantling sun is to be expressed by bright golden light behind the figure ; the pedestal moon is to be a crescent with downward pointing horns ; and the twelve stars above are to be raised on silver rays, forming a diadem like the celestial crown in heraldry. The robe of the Virgin covering her feet with decent folds, must be white, and her mantle blue, and round her waist must be tied the cord of St. Francis. Here is the reason for the directions : in this guise the Virgin appeared to the noble nun of Portugal, who, in 1511, founded a religious order of the Conception at Toledo. Ex- cept that Murillo commonly dispenses with the Franciscan cord and the crown of stars, and takes the liberty of reversing the horns of the moon, it will be seen that he has precedent for his pre- sentment of the Madonna. As for those sturdy zephyrs of Christian mythology, they are also provided for by Pacheco, who decides that they are to hover above the figure bearing emblematic boughs and flowers. To object to Murillo's " Conceptions " on the ground that they follow the prescribed formula MURILLO 85 is to be unduly censorious, and it must also be remembered that these Madonnas were in com- plete accord with the religious teaching and devout emotionalism of the age. To the seventeenth century Catholics of Andalusia, Murillo's beauti- ful representations of the woman magnified of God above all women, appealed more directty and more forcibly, than the virgins of Giotti would have done. Religious transport filled those melting blue eyes, and divinity dwelt in the beauty of these worshipped creations. To-day, we are inclined to be indifferent to the religious inspiration and confine our admiration to the execution. Yet M. Charles Blanc has written of Murillo's " Infant Christ " :— "II a su imprimer au fils de Marie un caractere vraiment sur-human. On croit voir autour de la tete de cet enfant una aureole que le peintre n'a point figuree pourtant ; sa belle tete s'illumine ; son regard ouvert, penetrant k la fois vif et doux, lance des eclairs de genie, et il parait si grand, meme dans la tranquillite du sommeil, qu'on se sent averti de la presence d'un Dieu : patuit Deus. ' Chez Raphael,' dit un de nos critiques (M. Thore) ' la Vierge est plus vierge ; chez Murillo, I'enfant-Dieu est plus Dieu.' " Nor is the present age entirely wanting in men of feeling and artistry to whom MuriUo's creations are not without their direct and real message. One of the four great " Conceptions " in the 86 MURILLO Madrid Gallery shows only a part of the figure of the Virgin, with the arms folded over the breast, and the half-moon across the waist. " Standing before that picture," wrote Edmondo de Amicis, " my heart softened, and my mind rose to a height which it had never attained before. It was not the enthusiasm of faith ; it was a desire, a limit- less aspiration towards faith, a hope which gave me a glimpse of a nobler, richer, more beautiful life than I had hitherto led ; it was a new feeling of prayerfulness, a desire to love, to do good, to suffer for others, to expiate, and ennoble my mind and heart. I have never been so near believing as at that time ; I have never been so good and full of affection, and I fancy that my soul never shone more clearly in my face than then." With such confessions of faith before us as are here embodied in the pronouncements of M. Blanc and Signor de Amicis, is it possible, in a single sweeping sentence, to dismiss Murillo's practical influence as a teacher as fallacious or limited to his country and generation ? Yet C. Gasquoine Hartley declares that his " religious idylls were conceived for Andalusia, and the artistic result to the world would be the same if these pictures h ad never been painted," and she supports her verdict with the argument that " there is no element of per- MURILLO 87 manence in Murillo's Conceptions, and his work depends for its charm upon its execution, and not upon its inspiration. The painter's handhng si at times excellent, and often we are carried away by the witchery of his colour. But intellectually we remain unsatisfied ; instinctively we realise a want in the artistic ideal of his work." And again the same critic says, " Murillo's pictures are the visible result of Catholic Spain in its sensuous and emotional aspect. His art is not an utterance of his own, but of Catholic individuality. Herein was his limitation. His pictures typify the Anda- lusian ideal, but they do not reveal universal life. He depicted a phase from the life around him that was transitory and localised. He peopled his scenes with the common types of Andalusia, yet he surrounded them with an idealism of Catholic convention. In seeking to realise this dual counterfeit of natural life and heavenly ideal, Murillo lost dignity and universal truth. His drawing and his colouring delight the eye, but the thought behind what is portrayed is empty." And so we are led to the conclusion, which we may accept or disclaim as we choose, that as trans- lations of the Catholic faith into the common language of the people, as symbols of the develop- ment of the national religious life, Murillo's 88 MURILLO pictures are supreme ; that as the pioneer-painter in a new Spanish presentment of sacred scenes, Murillo achieved the greatness of initial accom- pUshment ; but that he missed " that strict fideUty to universal truth necessary to raise him among the great painters of the world." " He painted pictures," we read, " as they had never before been painted in Spain," and immediately after we are asked to beUeve that while his discovery, as it affected Andalusia, was great, " for the world it was meaningless." It would certainly seem that in this case the conclusion arrived at is not the logical outcome of the arguments employed ; that the critic is wrong either in her facts or her reasoning ; that her quantities or her additions must be at fault. But C. Gasquoine Hartley's deductions are greatly interesting, and they possess the added charm of sincerity. She has the art of making her case appear very good, as indeed it is, until we examine the arguments for the other side. Then we cannot help thinking that if she does not say more than she means, which is always possible when indulging in generalisations, she has judged MuriUo by an exalted standard which, if applied to aU artists, would rob many, if not most of them, of their universally admitted MURILLO 89 claims to immortality. There are some aspects of Murillo's art which, if he were to be judged by them alone, would relegate his pretentions to " the Nothing all things end in," and his name would be blotted out of the book of fame. But if some of his Madonnas are sweet even to satiety, and some of his holy children appeal only by their prettiness, there are many of his pictures which possess every element of permanence. Would the artistic results to the world have been the same if the " Charity of St. John of God," or " The Guardian Angel," or " Del Pajarito," or " vSt. Anthony of Padua," or " The Vision of St. Francis " — to mention no others — ^had never been painted ? Lomas, by no means a weakly partial admirer of^^^Murillo, has said of the two last- mentioned compositions, " There are here two real living Christs and two real living monks. There is no lack]of Divinity on the one side, or of humanity upon the other. These are perhaps his best, his most powerful pictures in Seville — not to say in the world. "|It has been said that a perfect picture must combine the design of Rafael, the lighting of Correggio, and the colouring of Titian ; and this unique combination has been traced by some of the most eminent art critics to more than one of the compositions of Murillo. 90 MURILLO To say that Murillo's pictures breathed the life around him, and that such hfe was transitory, is not to label him a superfluous and redundant painter. Hogarth, Vandyck, in some of their pictures at any rate— to give two names among many that might be cited— present the same inevitable limitations, and no artist who for- sakes the unchanging subjects of plastic nature — sky, and land and water — and the primitive emotions of love and hate and despair, shall appeal to the eyes and the emotions of every generation alike. As a painter of sacred scenes Murillo was a pioneer ; he painted pictures not only as they had never been painted before, but as they have never been painted since. There are pictures of Murillo's in Seville and Madrid, in our National Gallery, in the Louvre, and the Hermitage of St. Petersburg, the loss of which would be irreparable to art, and if his name and work were obliterated from the records of Spain, the Peninsula would be shorn of a great part of its artistic glory. His message for Andalusia has been accepted by the whole civihsed world ; the meaning and the reality of this passing phase of a national religious develop- ment is interpreted more vividly and convincingly in Murillo's canvases than in all the church his- tories that were ever written. MURILLO 91 All Murillo's Conceptions, Stirling-Maxwell declares, breathe " the same sentiment of purity, and express, so far as lies within the compass of the painter's art, that high and perfect nature, ' spotless without and innocent within,' ascribed by the religion of the south to the Mother of the Redeemer. Nurtured in this graceful and attrac- tive belief, and, perhaps kneeling daily before some of these creations in which Murillo has so finely embodied it, well might Sister Ines de la Cruz, the ' cloistered swan of Mexico/ exclaim in her passionate poem which was sung in the Cathedral of Puebla de los Angeles, at the feast of the Conception (1689) : — " ' Think' st thou the Saviour's mother was ever aught but bright, That darkness e'er polluted the fount of living light ? Her queenly throne in heaven, and her beauty cans't thou see. Yet deem our glorious lady, a child of sin like thee ?' " In the Sala de Murillo in Seville there is a large Conception, which was commissioned for the Fran- ciscan convent. As the composition was intended to be hung at a distance from the ground, the artist painted it with extraordinary bravura and vigour, and with a masterful eye for effect. But when the picture was brought into the convent, and before it was raised to its destined position. 92 MURILLO the Cathedral authorities saw only the bold crudities of the work and they refused to accept it. Murillo bowed to their decision, but asked as a favour that the work might be adjusted in the cupola that he could judge the work at the distance at which it was intended to be seen. The request was granted, and then the authorities immediately recognised the wonderful effect of the rough execution, and begged to be allowed to retain the picture. Thereupon, Murillo — so it is said, but leave must be given to doubt the story — demanded double the price that he was to have received for the work, and the fathers paid the sum rather than surrender it. In Spain, the most popular of Murillo's pic- tures, if we except the Conceptions, are his Holy Children. Yet these favourites of the people are not of his best work ; his greatest composi- tions, the strong, simple pictures, are frequently passed by in favour of these sweet-pretty com- positions — his often theatrical and ultra-sweet Marys, his attitudinising sacred infants, and his posing lambs. Among the latter the " Nino Jesus," the " Baptist with a Lamb," and " Los Ninos de la Concha " (the " Children of the Shell,"), which hang in the Prado, Madrid, are the most admired of his works. Charming they undoubtedly MURILLO 93 are, as are also the " St. John fondhng a Lamb " in our National Gallery, and the lovely, auburn- haired " Good Shepherd " in Baron Rothschild's collection, to cite two examples of his frequently- repeated studies of the Infant Christ and St. John, either with or without lambs. But a sweeter and truer representation of youth is to be seen at the Madrid Gallery in " Santa Anna giving a lesson to the young Virgin," in which the natural and graceful figure is unmarred by any suggestion of the stagey cherub-child ; or in the " Angel de la Guarda," in Seville Cathedral, already re- ferred to, in which the tender grace of the tiny child is fully realised, while the lightness and delicacy of the handling is also good. Lomas declares that this " Guardian Angel " and the "St. Anthony," painted for La Caridad, are not only far beyond all the rest of Murillo's pictures in value, but stand out like giants among the other art treasures of Seville Cathedral. The grave Pacheco tells us that the inspiration of Murillo's picture of the " Education of the Virgin " was found in a carving in the church of La Magdalena at Seville. The same theme was painted by Roelas, for the Convent of Mercy. Here the Madonna, " in a rose-coloured tunic, a blue starry mantle, and an imperial crown," kneels at the 94 MURILLO feet of her mother and reads from the pages of a missal. Pacheco declared against the subject as being unorthodox, because " the Virgin being placed in the Temple in her third year, must have owed her knowledge of letters to the agency of the Holy vSpirit." Murillo's conception of the scene is simple, and impressive. It has been conjectured that the models for the child and the noble head of the mother were found in Dona Beatriz and the young Francisca, the painter's wife and daughter. But beautiful and rapturous in expression as these Holy Children of Murillo appear, they are not so well known or so popular outside Spain as those soft-eyed, blooming, artless, picturesque urchins found in English and continental galleries, and famous the world over as Murillo's Beggar Boys. In our National Gallery are two of these genre pictures, the " Boy Drinking " and the " Spanish Beggar Boy " ; in the Dulwich Gallery there are two groups of " Peasant Boys " and a " Spanish Flower Girl " ; while yet other examples are in private collections in England, as well as in the Louvre, and at Munich and St. Petersburg. In Spain these Beggar Boys are rarely to be met with, and there is not a single instance of this manner of the painter in the pubhc galleries of either Seville or Madrid. Witching and picturesque as the figures MURILLO 95 may be, they are posed always m stereotyped attitudes ; they wear their rags Hke actors, and their very tatters are so arranged as to reveal their finely-moulded shoulders, or their finely- painted feet and hands. They are self-conscious, graceful, delightful, and aggressively untrue in their relation to life. But artificial as these studies indisputably are, and, in some instances, unpleasant in subject, it is surely ungracious and incorrect to conclude that the creator of the Conceptions and the many saintly compositions, reveals an unrefined mind in occasionally depicting an unpleasing scene in his pictures. William B. Scott, while claiming for Murillo the name of "the greatest painter Spain has produced," qualifies the title with a reserva- tion which most people will regard as unnecessary and untrue. His reference to the "common nature" of Murillo and his " coarseness of mind," are the phrases referred to : — " Compared to him," Mr. Scott writes, " there are three who may be preferred by those who are exclusive or pecuHar in taste. . . . These are Zurbaran, whose sympathies were in the cloister ; Ribera, whose power of hand is as great as that of Tintoretto, whose sympathies were cruel ; and Velaz- quez, who was essentially a portrait painter. But Murillo was wider than either or all of them perhaps, and the beauty of his treatment, and mastery of his technique, has made him, 96 MURILLO in spite of a commonplace character and coarseness of mind that places him below the greatest of the Italian masters, the representative name in the art of Spain." Mr. Scott proceeds to emphasize and " rub in " the vulgarity of Murillo's nature and the coarseness of his mind in a way that is scarcely justifiable; but, perhaps, his criticism is hardly worthy of serious notice. Although the artist went to beggars and cripples for many of his subjects, he idealised them with a refinement and sense of the beautiful which a vulgar or coarse nature could never effect. Here is a passage which is quoted as illustrative of this critic's contention : — "In a country like Spain, MurUlo became easily the favourite of the crowd. He was one of themselves, and had all the gifts they valued. Not, like Velazquez, reproducing by choice only the noble and dignified side of the national character, Murillo preferred the vulgar, but had sufficient versatility to change his theme as often as he chose. He, like all the older Spanish painters, knew how to give the blessed fervour of the devotee, or the ecstasy of the glorified monk, but he could also (and this was his own) paint to perfection the rags and the happiness of the gipsy beggar boys, a flower-girl grinning at you with a lapful of flowers, or the precocious sentiment of the Good Shepherd, with the lamb by his side, painted to a miracle. Pious, and profoundly Catholic, he often prayed for long hours in the church of his parish, and did not fail to remark, after vespers, the donnas and damsels lifting their masks to give him a glimpse of their faces. He mixed happily the mundane and the celestial, and found it MURILLO 97 possible to enjoy them together ; nor was his taste exclusive — the filthy mendicant catching the troublesome vermin is one of his most favourite minor works, and the subject scarcely attracts our attention, the splendour of the colour and chiaro- scuro being so complete." The author of that disparaging passage might have conceded to the artist that the subject was to him an incident in the daily hfe of the city ; Murillo saw the artistic possibiHties of the study, and he used them in the composition of a master- piece. Mr. Scott speaks of this " El Piojoso " as one of the painter's favourite works, leaving it to be inferred or supposed that Murillo so gloried in the subject that he immortalised it in a spirit of personal appreciation. C. Gasquoine Hartley employs the picture to point a very different moral. Murillo's boys, she explains, are all idealised and made beautiful by the fancy and genius of the artist — so much so that " even the lousy boy in the garret searches for the vermin in a picturesque attitude." H VII. In 1656, Miirillo was commissioned by Don Justino Neve to paint the four pictures for the renovated church of Sta. Maria la Blanca, and in 1678, the canon, who had been largely instrumental in building a new hospital for superannuated priests in Seville, known as " Los Venerables," again employed his friend to execute three pictures for its adornment. These canvases comprise his "St. Peter Weeping," in which the painter's first sincere manner, recalling Ribera, again confronts us ; a mystery of the Immaculate Conception, which Cean Bermudez preferred, for beauty of colouring, to all Murillo's pictures on that subject in SeviUe ; and a " Blessed Virgin with her Divine Babe," which Joseph Townsend ("Journey through Spain in 1786 and 1787") considered the most charming of all the works of Murillo. This latter picture, which was hung in the refectory of Los Venerables, was " burgled " by Soult. The canvas dealing with this subject, still to be seen in the Museum of Cadiz, is an indifferent copy of the original. The portrait of Canon Justino Neve, which, after MURILLO 99 various changes of place and ownership, now be- longs to Lord Lansdowne, was painted about this time. This portrait has evidently been the subject of the artist's loving care, the clear, olive face of the benevolent but strenuous priest, with the dark, intelligent eyes, and the delicate beard and moustachios, bespeak at once the scholar and the aristocrat. We see him dressed in a black cassock and seated on a chair of red velvet, a gold medal is suspended from his neck ; his finger is inserted as a bookmarker between the leaves of the small breviary he holds. On the stone portal beside him his armorial bearings are sculptured ; a small timepiece is on an adjacent table, and the little spaniel which lies at his feet is so naturally represented that Palomino solemnly records that living dogs have been known to snarl and bark as they approached it. The same authority is responsible for the story that birds have been seen attempting to perch on and peck at the flowers that are painted in Murillo's picture of " St. Anthony of Padua." Soon after he had completed his work for Los Venerables and the portrait of his friend the Canon, Murillo was at work upon a series of pictures for the restored high altar of the conventual church of the Augustines. The pictures depict scenes in the 100 MURILLO life of the glorious Bishop of Hippo, the tutelar saint of the Order, and of these, two are now in the Museum of Seville, while a third was carried to France, and was one of the most treasured pictures in the collection of Louis Philippe. According to a note in the Catalogue of the Spanish Gallery of the King, the theme of the picture is founded on the story of the interview which Augustine had with a child upon the sea- shore. The infant was discovered intent upon the task of filling a hole in the sand with water conveyed from the sea in a shell, and when ques- tioned as to his purpose, he explained that it was his intention to remove into the hole he had made all the water of the ocean. " But," declared the divine, " the task is impossible," to which the small doubter replied, " Not more impossible than for you to explain the mystery of the Holy Trinity, upon which you are at this moment meditating." In this picture the figure of Augustine is too short, but the head is dignified, and admirably painted. For the Augustine Convent, Murillo also executed two compositions illustrative of scenes in the life of the benevolent St. Thomas of Villanueva. One of these is the picture referred to as being in the possession of Lord Ashburton. Before the French occupation, the Cathedral of MURILLO loi Seville contained two Murillos. which now are not to be seen there. On Soult's arrival at Seville, the superb " Birth of the Virgin " and " The Flight into Egypt " were concealed by the Chapter, but the Marshal was informed of their existence, and he notified the authorities that he " would be pleased to accept them . " He further hinted at an alterna- tive method of procuring them. Richard Ford relates that when Soult was showing a guest his picture gallery in Paris, he stopped before a Murillo and remarked, " I very much value that, as it saved the lives of two estimable persons." An aide-de- camp whispered to Colonel Gurwood, the Marshal's guest, " He threatened to have both shot on the spot, unless they gave up the picture." The " Birth of the Virgin " was painted in 1655, and it was acquired for the Louvre, in 1858, from the Duke of Dalmatia, the son of Marshal Soult. The picture was then valued at 150,000 francs. In estimating this work Mr, Charles Ricketts writes : — " Perhaps Murillo's best claim to fame rests upon this picture, with its agreeable vein of playful invention, and a sort of feminine charm which pervades it." The " Fhght into Egypt " is one of the score of Murillo's compositions that hang in the public gallery at St. Petersburg, In 1682 Murillo was sixty-four years of age ; he 102 MURILLO was possessed of a sufficiency of this world's goods, and a repute second to that of no painter in Spain. Still, an almost passionate love of Seville remained one of his strongest characteristics. It must, therefore, have been his sympathy with, and affection for his friends the Franciscans, and neither pecuniary motives nor ambition to add to his fame, that induced him to accept an offer to visit Cadiz and paint five pictures for the church of the Capuchin Friars. The principal composition, representing the espousals of St. Catherine, was to adorn the altar. He was engaged upon this work when he met with the accident which caused his death. He had almost completed the principal group of figures — the Virgin, the Infant Jesus, and the mystical bride — and was, one day, mounting a scaffolding to reach the upper part of his canvas when he stumbled so violently as to cause a rupture in the intestines. Palomino tells us that the natural modesty of the master deterred him from revealing the nature of the injury. His reticence cost him his life. He was brought home to Seville, where he grew rapidly worse. His notary, Juan Antonio Guerrero, received instructions to draw up his will, but at six o'clock on the evening of the same day, the 3rd of April, 1682, and before he could append his signature to the deed, he expired. MURILLO 103 His friend and patron, Justino Neve, held him in his arms when the end came, and beside his deathbed was his youthful second son, Gaspar Esteban Murillo, and his pupil, Pedro Nunez de Villavicencio. During the long days of his painful illness Murillo had himself carried into his parish church of Santa Cruz. Here he performed his devotions before Pedro Campana's powerful, if not wholly satisfying, painting of the " Descent from the Cross," which hung over the altar. This was his favourite picture, and it is related by Ponz, that when asked, one day, why he gazed upon it so long and so expectantly, he replied, " I am waiting till those men have brought down the body of Our Blessed Lord from the Cross." It was Murillo' s own wish that his body should be laid beneath this picture, and thither it was conveyed on the day after his decease. Joachim von Sandrart says that his funeral was celebrated with great pomp, the bier being borne by two marquesses and four knights, attended by a great concourse of people of all ranks, who loved and esteemed the great painter. Doiia Beatriz de Cabrera, Murillo's wife, had predeceased her husband, but at the time of his death his two sons, a daughter, and his sister 104 MURILLO were still alive. His daughter, Francisca, had become a Dominican nun in the fine convent of the Mother of God in 1676, at which time she relinquished her claim to inherit from her father. His eldest son, Gabriel Esteban, who was in the West Indies at the time of Murillo's death, is said to have obtained a benefice of the value of 3,000 ducats, but Palomino does not say when he took orders, or where his preferment was situated. The younger son, Gaspar Esteban, obtained a benefice at Carmona, and in 1685, before he was fourteen years old, he was made a canon of Seville Cathedral. This speedy promotion was due to the influence of his uncle, Don Joseph de Veitia Linage, who had married Murillo's sister Teresa, or as Palomino styles her, Tomasa Josepha. Don Joseph, who was an hidalgo of Burgos, a knight of Santiago, and a judge of the royal tribunal of the colonies, was a man of varied attainments, who, after his marriage, was summoned to Madrid as Secretary of the Council for the Affairs of New Spain, and subsequently in 1682 succeeded Eguya as Chief Secretary of State. His protege, young Murillo, appears to have distinguished himself little as a dignitary of the Church, but as a painter he became a tolerable imitator of his father's style, and died at Seville on the 2nd of May, 1709. MURILLO 105 The fatal altar-piece for the Capuchin Church at Cadiz, completed by Meneses Osorio, who added the glory and the hovering angels, may still be seen over the high altar in the chapel of the convent, now an hospital, at Cadiz. Of the sum of 900 crowns which Murillo was to have been paid for the five pictures, he had already received 350 crowns. This we read in his will, from which it is evident that he did not die a rich man, although for forty years of his life he had received good prices for his pictures. He left only one hundred reals in money, in addition to seventy crowns which were found in a desk, says Palomino, but his will further informs us that he died possessed of several houses in the parish of La Magdalena, besides his wife's olive farm at Pilas, a quantity of plate and furniture, and many finished and unfinished pic- tures. This document proclaims his adherence to the faith of the Roman Catholic Church, orders the disposal of his body, and provides for four hundred masses to be said for the repose of his soul — one-fourth in the Church of vSta. Cruz, one- fourth in the Convent Church of Mercy, and the remainder in any church selected by his executors, the Canon Neve and Nunez de Villavicencio. In the foregoing pages there will, it is hoped, be found an instinctive, unconscious testimony to io6 MURILLO the simple nobility of the character of Murillo — a tribute that is paid to the Master by all students of his work. His pictures are indeed the true index of the painter's nature ; in them he has imbedded a large part of himself. As we have already said, he selected the words " Vive Moriturus " for his admonitory motto, and his choice was justified by the record of his life. As a craftsman he could be strong with the strongest, but without the brutality of strength ; his fervour and purity are reflected from the eyes of his Holy Children, his Saints, and his Madonnas. His career is a story of " persisting toil, sincere faith, loving friendship, and large-hearted kindness." An Andalusian to the core of his heart, he was free from the Andalusian vice of boastfulness ; and even at the height of his great renown his humility was unexampled. He rejoiced in the fine work of his fellow-artists ; he was too sincere in his devotion to art, as Valdes Leal was too arrogant, to admit of rivalry. Cean Bermudez relates of Murillo that his scholars in all things found him the opposite of the testy Herrera ; a gentle and painstaking master, and a generous and devoted friend. The prayers and tears of the populace that loved him followed his body to the grave ; his intimates lamented his death as if they had been his children. MURILLO 107 For long it was deplored that Seville erected no monument to her great son — that neither in stone nor marble was his memory perpetuated in the city of his birth and his labours. Then, at last, in 1864, a bronze statue of this painter was placed in the Plaza del Museo, at the entrance of the old Convento de la Merced, now the Museo Provincial, the shrine of his works. But his pictures are the noblest monuments of his fame, while the record of his life is a memory that will last while Spain endures. List of Works of Murillo, with a short description of the paintings, and an indication of where the originals are preserved. Order of Plates repro- duced. Title. Description. Gallery. I The Holy Family. El Pajarito — the Uttle burd. The Infant Saviour, fully draped, leans against the right knee of St. Joseph, playfully holding " the little bird " from the reach of a small dog " begging " for it. The Virgin seated at a table, weaving, suspends her work to watch the scene. A basket of linen is on the floor at her side. Canvas, 5 ft. 2 ins. by 6 ft. 9 ins. Life-size fig^Jres. Prado, Madrid. St* Antony with the Infant Saviour. St. Antony of Padua kneeling upon a stone of his cell, a cluster of hlies in his right hand ; he en- circles with his left the hips of the Child who is seated on an open folio. Four child-angels are joy- fully disporting amid clouds above. Seville Museum. 3 La Porciuncula. The Apparition of St. Francis, called " La Porciuncula," which alludes to the grand jubilee of the Franciscans (ist August). St. Francis, kneeling on the step of an altar amid roses scattered upon him by many child-angels, looks appeahngly to his celestial visi- tants. Jesus, with His left hand clasping the Cross, extends His right hand towards the Saint, partly in benediction yet half- wamingly. The Virgin, at His left hand, her right hand upon her bosom, is manifestly inter- ceding for the Saint. This pic- ture has been much " restored." Canvas, 6 ft. 8 ins. by 4 ft. 9 ins. Figures, small life-size. Prado, Madrid. no MURILLO Order of Plates repro- duced. Title. Description. Gallery. 4 Our Lady and St. Eliza- beth with Infants Saviour and St. John, called La Vierge de Seville. The Eternal Father and the Holy Spirit, attended by child-angels in clouds above, are giving bene- diction to the group below, which consists of the Infant Saviour and the Infant St. John, Our Lady and St. Elizabeth, the mother of St. John. The Saviour stands upright on the Virgin's left knee ; St. EUzabeth kneeling in adoration, introduces St. John, who, holding in his left hand the Agnus Dei, with the other hand presents a Cross to the Child. In the foreground a lamb, recumbent. The picture is signed : BARTHOLOM DE MURILLO F HISPAN. Added to the Louvre by Louis XVl. Louvre. 5 Our Lady and St. EUzabeth, &c. A portion of the foregoing pic- ture. Louvre. 6 The Child Jesus as Shepherd. The Child is seated on a mound amid ruined columns and archi- tecture overgrown with foliage. In His right hand a crook ; His left arm resting caressingly upon a lamb. In the distance sheep are grazing. Canvas, 4 ft. 5 ins. by 3 ft. 7j ins. Prado, Madrid. 7 Our Lady of the Imma- culate Conception. Our Lady stands upon the cres- cent moon, her eyes dechned to earth, her finger-tips brought to- gether. To the right of the spectator three child-angels bear a scroll inscribed IN PRINCIPIO DILEXIT EAM. On the left, six (human) figures in devotion. Bought for the Louvre in 1818 for 6,000 francs. Painted in 1656-57 for the church of Santa Maria la Blanca, whence it was " conveyed " with other works by Marshal Soult. Canvas, 172 m. high, 2 "85 m. wide. Louvre. 8 The Annunciation. Before a tab e, on which stands a book and cluster of lilies, the Virgin is kneeling with eyes down- cast,and with hands crossed upon Prado, Madrid. MURILLO III Order of Plates repro- duced. Description. Gallerv. her bosom. The messenger, Gabriel, with right knee upon the ground, and right arm ex- tended towards Mary, is, with the left hand indicating the pre- sence of the Holy Dove, which hovers in the middle of the pic- ture between groups of child- angels. Canvas, 4 ft. 6 ins. by 3 ft. ejins. Jacob's Dream. The Assumption. St. Thomas of Villa- nueva distributing alms. The patriarch Ues asleep upon the ground, his head reclining on a stone, his staff is near him. On his right hand an angel, whose left hand is upon the ladder, his left foot upon the lowest rung. On the ladder are two angels as- cending, and three descending. This picture formerly belonged to the Marques de Santiago, Madrid ; it is the companion pic- ture to Isaac blessing Jacob. (See No. 36). Our Lady, upborne by child- angels, and with cherubim in either top corners of the picture, gazes heavenward, her finger- tips joined as in prayer. Below is the sarcophagus, or Spanish urna, and behind it the Meiries kneeling. The twelve Apostles are grouped about the tomb. This picture was acquired by the Marquis of Hertford at the Stowe sale of the Duke of Buckingham's collection in 1848. There are fifteen figures in this composition, including that of the Virgin seated on clouds with the Infant Saviour at her breast : two other children are clinging to her. St. Thomas, wearing his mitre and attended by his crozier- bearer, is giving relief to a beggar kneeling before him : other men- dicants are awaiting their turns. This picture was bought at King Louis Philippe's sale in 1853 by Thomas Baring, uncle of Lord 112 MURILLO Order of Plates repro- duced. Title. Description. Gallery. Northbrook, for £yio. Richard Ford thought very highly of this example, calling it " one of the finest Murillo's in existence." 12 Our Lady with the In- fant Saviour. The illustration represents only a portion of the picture in the Pitti Palace at Florence. The Child stands naked in the Virgin's lap. His left arm resting on her right wrist ; His right arm upon her bosom. The Virgin's left arm encircles the Saviour's hips. Pitti Palace, Florence. 13 Our Lady with the In- fant Saviour. The Child is seated on the Virgin's left knee, with His right foot thrown across her lap ; His left foot between her knees. The Virgin's left arm surrounds the Saviour's shoulders : the Child's left arm is resting on the Virgin's right wrist. Life-size. Corsini Palace. Rome. 14 Peasant Girl and Boy. The girl, seated, is counting money; the boy, behind a basketful of luscious grapes, is interestedly watching the operation. Land- scape, background ; figures, life- size. King of Bavaria's Collection, Pinakothek, Munich. 15 Boys throwing Dice. Two peasant boys gambUng ; a third, with right foot advanced, stands beside them munching bread. A basketful of fruit and a broken pitcher in the fore- ground : a dog looks up appeal- ingly to the standing figure, ex- pecting a share of his food. King of Bavaria's Collection, Pinakothek, Munich. 16 The Children Jesus and St. John. This picture is known as Los Ninos de la Concha — the Children of the Shell. St. John is drinking from a scallop shell held in the right hand of Jesus. St. John bears a cross upon his left shoulder with the Agnus Dei entwined about the upper part ; his lamb is con- templating the innocent scene, while enraptured cherubim re- joice in the clouds. Figures life size. Prado, Madrid. MURILLO Order of Plates repro- duced. Title. Description. Gallery. 17 Rebecca and Eleazex at the Well. Genesis xxiv. 18 — "And she hasted, and let down her pitcher upon her hand, and gave him drink." Four female figures at the well, each of whom has a pitcher. Abraham s servant is in the act of drinking. Men, horses, and camels are seen in the back- ground. Canvas, 3 ft. 10 ins. by 5 ft. 5 ins. Prado, Madrid. i8 The Child St. John. A figure seated on a rock with left foot advanced ; gazing heaven- ward J his right hand upon his breast. His left hand, holding a rude cross, with the Agnus Dei entwined about it, rests upon the back of his lamb. Life-size. Prado, Madrid. 19 St. John Baptist as a Child. A full-length figure, slightly bend- ing to place his right hand caress- ingly upon the neck of his lamb, which trustfully responds. In his left hand St. John bears a tall cross entwined with the Agnus Dei. Life-size. Belvedere Gallery, Vienna. 30 A Boy Drinking. The boy, with an arch expression of great enjoyment, holds in his right hand a tall glass by its foot ; which he is raising to his hps ; his left hand supports a square- faced black bottle on the table before him. He is clad in fan- tastic garb, his doublet slashed, showing his linen shirt sleeves ; his headdress of linen, worn tur- ban-wise, is decorated with vine leaves ; one end of a neckerchief he is wearing descends over his right shoulder and rests upon the table. Dark background. Life- size figure seen to the waist. Be- queathed to the Nation by Mr. John Staniforth Beckett in 1889. A small but very beautiful picture (19 by 15 inches) of this subject, and attributed to Miurillo, has been bequeathed by Lady Murray to the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh. National Gallery, London. I MURILLO Order of Plates repro- duced. Title. Description. Gallery. 21 The Madonna of the Our Lady seated on clouds with the Infant Saviour seated on her left knee ; His right hand sUghtly raised, His left resting on His leg. A rosary, which the Child holds with both hands, passes be- tween the thumb and forefinger of the Virgin's right hand, which is resting in the Saviour's lap ; her left clasps the Child ; four child-angels are disporting be- neath. Purchased by Mr. Desen- fans from Lord St. Helens, who brought it from Spain where he was Ambassador. Dulwich Gallery, England. 22 Girl with White Man- tilla. A beautiful young woman with eyes downcast and with devout expression is clasping her hands in prayer. A veil is upon her head, and falls upon either shoulder. The picture formerly belonged to Sir Thomas Baring. Life-size. Holford Collection, Dorchester House, London. 23 St. Antony of Padua with the Infant Saviour. In the arms of the kneeling Saint is the Infant Saviour, whose right hand caresses the cheek of St. Antony. Two child-angels are on the ground in front of the two figures, one toying with an open folio, the other holding aloft a cluster of lilies ; five others are hovering above. This example was acquired in 1835 at Paris for the Museum at Berlin. Mr. J . C. Robinson, of London, is said to possess the original study for this picture, a sketch once owned by Don Julian Williams. See also No. 42 for a portion of this picture. Life-size. Royal Museum, BerUn. 24 The Mystical Ascen- sion. St. Bernard sup- plicating the Virgin. 1 The Apparition of St. Bernard. The kneeling Saint is represented in his cell. On a rude table is an open book, with a cluster of lilies near by. On the ground other folios and his pastoral staff. The Virgin, with the Infant Jesus sup- ported on her left arm appears, Prado, Madrid. MURILLO 115 Our Lady of the Rosary. St. Joseph and the In- fant Jesus. St. Antony of Padua visited by the Infant Saviour. Description. surrounded by child-angels and cherubim, and is offering from her bosom sustenance to the Saint, a mystic allusion to the succour afforded him through all his privations and penances. Life- size. The Virgin sits on a stone bench, on which, at her left, is a ball ; the Child, seated on her lap, is hold- ing a rosary with both hands ; the rosary passes over the Vir- gin's right forefinger, and is sus- pended below her right knee ; the forefinger touches tjie right knee of the Child. There is some doubt respecting the possession of this picture ; it probably hangs in the gallery of the Pitti Palace at Florence. Half-length. St. Joseph supports the Child, his right hand on the hips, his left touching the breast of the Infant, who sustains with both hands a tall lily branch, which extends far above the left shoulder of the Saint. Acquired by the Due de Montpen- sier for Seville, from the gallery of K. Louis-Philippe. The Child Jesus attended by many angels and cherubim appears to the kneeling monk. A prominent £mgel above the Child's head, pro- bably meant for Gabriel, seems to point out St. Antony to the Child who, with both arms ex- tended, welcomes the Saint to a scene of bliss. On a table, lilies are standing in a vase of water ; an open book near. This is the picture of which an idle tale is told of the Iron Duke offer- ing to cover the gigantic master- piece with oimces of gold, a temptation dechned by the Chap- ter. Unfortunately in 1833, the picture was cruelly re-touched by Gutierrez. Figures greater than Ufe-size. Gallery. ii6 MURILLO Order of Plates repro- duced. Title. Description. Gallery. 28 The Marriage of St. Catherine. The last work of Murillo ; the fatal altar-piece painted for the Capuchin Church, at Cadiz, the gift of Juan Violeto, a Genoese, and devotee of St. Catherine. The picture was completed from Murillo's drawings by Meneses Osorio, his pupil, who did not venture to interfere with what his master had done in the first lay of colours. The smaller accessories are by Meneses, and the difference is evident. The Virgin, seated on a dais, holds in her lap the Infant Saviour, who is about to place the ring on a finger of the right hand of St. Catherine. Behind the Virgin are three angels, and behind St. Catherine two angels. Three child-angels are bringing vest- ments ; angels and cherubim with wreath and palm branch. In the foreground a sword lying across the segment of a wheel. Murillo's sketch for this picture was in the possession of Rafael Mengs, and afterwards, in 1S69, it was in Lafont's sale at Paris. Cadiz. 29 at. inonias 01 viiia- nueva. St. Thomas, wearing his mitre and carrying the crozier in his left hand, is in the act of placing a coin in the outstretched hand of a lame beggar kneeling before him at the door of his Cathedral. Other mendicants stand around awaiting their turn. Books, and a number of coins are lying on a table on the right of the Saint. Figures life-size. Murillo was wont to allude to this work as su cuadfo — his own pic- ture. Seville Museum. 30 St. Joseph with the In- fant Jesus. Half-length. St. Joseph holds in the right hand a lily branch ; his left arm around the Child, who stands, partly draped, with left foot advanced, near the knee of St. Joseph. The finger-tips of the Infant's right hand touch the Hermitage, St. Peters- burg. MURILLO 117 Order of Plates repro- duced. Title. Description. Gallery. Saint's breast ; His left hand clasps a finger of the hand around Him. This work was purchased by Prince Troubetskoy for St. Petersburg about the year 1820. 31 The Flight iato Egypt. The Virgin, seated on an ass, has the Infant Saviour reclining on her left arm ; an expression of great tenderness rests on the face of the mother as she regards the Babe. St. Joseph walks beside with staff in his right hand, a wallet is slung from his shoulders. Above, in the clouds, are three child-angels. Hermitage, St. Peters- burg. 32 St. Joseph with the In- fant Saviour. St. Joseph, a lily branch in his left hand, is with the right leading the Infant, who is robed and san- dalled. Two child-angels above. Presented to the Emperor of Russia by Mr. Coesvelt. Hermitage, St. Peters- burg. 33 St. Antony with the Infant Saviour. The Child st£mds on an open foUo, His right hand extended in bene- diction, His left hand in the right hand of the Saint, who, kneeling, regards the Babe with an air of love and deep devotion. Five child-angels in the upper cor- ners of the picture, one of whom holds prominently a cluster of lilies. Hermitage, St. Peters- burg. 34 Christ at the Column. Tied up to a column Christ, who is naked except for a cloth about His loins, turns to the left and looks at St. Peter, who bows before Him, with his left hand on his breast ; a book and keys lie on the ground between them. Bought at the sale of the Count de Vandreuil by Louis XVI. Companion picture to Jesus Christ in the Garden of Olives. | Louvre. ii8 MURILLO Order of Plates repro- duced. Title. Description, Gallery. 35 Repose during the Flight into Egypt. 1 Our Lady, seated, is contemplat- ing the Infant sleeping on a rock, a pillow beneath His head ; His right arm across His breast. On the right of the Virgin are two child-angels interestedly watch- ing. St. Joseph, standing on the left of the Virgin, appears to be listening to her eulogies. In the foreground, a large flask, a pack, and head gear. Hermitage, St. Peters- burg. 36 '■"Si Isaac Blessing Jacob. Under an archway, Isaac, raised in bed, is in the act of blessing Jacob, who, kneeling, is pre- sented by his mother. To the left of spectator in the landscape is a maiden carrying a pitcher to the well. In ttie background Esau, accompanied by dogs, is approaching. Purchased in Paris, 181 X by Baron Denon for the Emperor of Russia. Companion picture to Jacob's Dream (see No. 9). Both are at the Hermitage. Hermitage, St. Peters- burg. 37 SS. Bonaventure and Leander. The two Saints are in colloquy ; one holding the model of a church, the other a scroll inscribed. The almost nude boy, peeping from behind a mitre he is holding, has been mistaken for a child-angel, so beautiful is he. Figures natural size. Seville Museum. 38 St. Alphonsus receiving the Chasuble. The Saint is reverently receiving the divinely embroidered sacer- dotal garment from the hands of Our Lady : Attendant angels assist her in displaying it. A venerable abbess, overcome with emotion at the scene, is observ- ing the presentation. Child- angels and cherubim are hover- ing above. Figures life-size. PradD, Madrid. 39 St. Augustine. The holy priest in full canonicals and with hands outspread, is kneeling on the step of an altar ; a child-angel on either side of him, one bearing his mitre, the other his crozier. In the clouds are Prado, Madrid. MURILLO 119 Order of Plates repro- duced. SS. Justa and Rufina. 43 St. Thomas of Villa- nueva. St. Antony of Padua. St. Andrew the Apostle Description. represented, to the right of the spectator, Our Lady offering him sustenance from her bosom ; to the left, the Saviour Crucified. Angels and cherubim. Three large folios in the foreground. A most forcible yet tender picture in Murillo's calido style. The two saints — guardians of Seville — are represented at full length, each holding a palm-branch in the right hand, and supporting between them the Giralda. The pottery in the foreground is in allusion to the vocation they fol- lowed at Triana, a suburb of Seville. The Saint, holding a purse in his left hand, is, with the other, dropping a coin into the right hand of a half-naked beggar, crippled, who sits with a crutch across his knees. St. Thomas is attended by two ecclesiastics,who bear his mitre and crozier ; before him is a boy, a splendid fellow, who exultingly holds aloft a coin to his mother, who has a younger child in her arms. A boy on the right of the Saint seems to be critically examining a coin in the palm of his hand. This picture was acquired by the Mcirquis of Hertford at the Wells SaL:" in 1848 for £2,992 los. A portion of the picture which is represented in its entirety in the illustration No. 23. The Saint, bound to a saltier cross, is raising his appealing eyes to heaven. In the clouds are angels and cherubim, with the palm and crown of martyrdom. A figure to the extreme left of the specta- tor, probably intended for the governor of Patras, is directing the proceedings ; he is accom- panied by women, one of whom appears to be weeping. A life 120 MURILLO Order of Plates repro- duced. Description. Gallery. like dog in the right-hand corner of the picture scents blood on the figure of a spearman. This was a glorious picture in Murillo's vaporoso style, but the harmonies of the colour are spoiled by the violent repainting of the white horse of tiie soldier in the fore- ground ; the scant drapery of the Apostle has also been much " repaired." The Annunciation . St. Elizabeth of Hun- gary. The Angel Gabriel, his left knee touching the ground, and bear- ing a cluster of UUes in his left hand, points with his right hand to the Holy Spirit, which is seen at the top of the picture. The angel is announcing the message to the Virgin, who kneels, with downcast eyes, an