Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

Baroque painter Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1617-1682) became the most popular Spanish religious artist of his era through tender, accessible imagery. Born in Seville, the youngest of 14 children, he was orphaned by age 11 and raised by his older sister. He trained in the workshop of his uncle and godfather Juan del Castillo, absorbing a style characterized by soft expressions and loving sentiment. His 1645 marriage to Beatriz Cabrera produced 11 children, though at least four died in the devastating 1649 plague that killed half of Seville's population.

Murillo's religious paintings featured sweetly idealized Madonnas and saints that appealed to both clergy and lay audiences. His version of the Immaculate Conception, showing the Virgin on a crescent moon surrounded by cherubs, established an iconographic type followed for generations. His images of street children constitute a remarkable record of Seville's poor: The Young Beggar (c. 1645, now at the Louvre) shows a ragged boy picking fleas in a shaft of light. These works, often acquired by foreign collectors, reflected the bitter poverty ravaging 17th-century Seville. Murillo helped found the Seville Academy of Painting in 1660 and served as its first president. He fell from a scaffold while painting for the Capuchin church of Cadiz in 1682 and died from his injuries. He was the first Spanish artist to achieve wide European fame. Major works hang at the Prado, the Louvre, the Hermitage, and the National Gallery London.