The Adoration of the Shepherds by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

The Adoration of the Shepherds by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

Light from the manger

The shepherds have come in from the dark, and the light they kneel toward comes from the child. Murillo makes that literal: the infant on the straw is the brightest thing in the picture, and every face — Mary’s, Joseph’s, the old shepherd with his hands clasped, the one with the lamb — is lit from below by it. An ox looks in from the left. It is the Nativity as Luke tells it, with nothing added.

The shepherds are Sevillian

This is the quality that made Murillo. The shepherds are not types; they are the people who would have stood outside his studio door — a barefoot old man in a sheepskin, a pair of hens tied by the feet on the floor, an old woman in a headscarf with a basket of eggs. He painted the poor of Seville for a living, and here he puts them at the manger without condescension and without dressing them up.

Where it hangs

The Prado, Madrid, which holds one of the finest groups of Murillos anywhere. It was painted around 1650, in the same early years as the Virgin of the Rosary also in this collection.

About this print

Made from the Prado’s own reproduction, 5,640 pixels wide, in the painting’s landscape format.

Sources: Museo Nacional del Prado, P000961 · Wikidata Q11821340 · Wikimedia Commons