Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–1682) was born in Seville, trained under Juan del Castillo, and worked there for most of his life, with periods in Cádiz and Madrid. Velázquez and Zurbarán are both recorded among his influences, and something of each survives in his work — the former's handling, the latter's austerity — though he softened both. He became the defining painter of the Sevillian Baroque and, for a long stretch of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the most admired Spanish artist in Europe. His Immaculate Conceptions established the visual formula that devotional art has used ever since. He painted street children with the same attention he gave to saints, which is part of why the religious pictures avoid sentimentality: the tenderness is observed rather than applied. Five works here, including Saint Rose of Lima, Brother Juniper and the Beggar, and A Peasant Boy leaning on a Sill — the devotional and the everyday side by side.