The Virgin of the Rosary by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

The Virgin of the Rosary by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

A Madonna who looks back

Most Madonnas look at the Child, or down, or away. This one looks at you, and so does he. Mary sits with the boy on her lap; he holds a rosary loosely across his knee and turns his head to meet the viewer’s eye with the frank, slightly appraising look of a real two-year-old. The exchange is the whole picture. Everything else — the deep blue mantle, the red dress, the gold cloth over the chair — is there to frame it.

Seville, around 1650

Murillo painted this early, in his first decade as an independent master in Seville, before the soft, luminous late style that made him the most popular religious painter in Europe. The handling here is firmer and the colour stronger, closer to Zurbarán and Ribera than to the Murillo of the Immaculate Conceptions. It is a devotional picture for a home or a confraternity, sized and composed to be looked at from close by.

Where it hangs

The painting belongs to the Louvre and has been on deposit at the Musée Goya in Castres since 1949. At 166 by 125 centimetres it is a substantial canvas, and the museum’s photograph of it is one of the largest reproductions of any Murillo available — nearly ten thousand pixels tall.

About this print

Made from that photograph at full resolution, which is what allows this piece to be offered up to 30 by 40 inches.

Sources: Musée du Louvre, INV 929 (on deposit at the Musée Goya, Castres) · Wikidata Q20873211 · Wikimedia Commons