Date: 03-04-2005
Owning Institution: National Gallery
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: 17th Century        

On this day in 1682, the Spanish painter Bartolome Esteban Murillo died, at sixty-five years of age. He was well loved in his home town of Seville, according to the early biographer Antonio Palomino, where his sweetly familial depictions of the Holy Family earned him a reputation as an irreproachably pious and decorous artist. Indeed, according to Palomino, “Our Murillo was also so modest that we can say that he died of pure decorousness; for being up on a scaffolding in order to paint a very large picture of saint Catherine that he was doing for the Capuchin Convent in the city of Cadiz, he stumbled going up this scaffolding, and because his intestines were ruptured, they came out; and so as not to manifest his weakness or allow himself to be examined he died of this accident…”

This week’s picture is Murillo’s beautiful, sombre self-portrait, painted roughly a decade before the accident that cut short his life, in about 1670-73. The work can be seen in the National Gallery in London. The artist places his own likeness within a stone cartouche or frame, a device borrowed from the engraved frontispieces of many seventeenth-century books. This suggests that he intended the work to serve a kind of memorial function – a portrait of the artist that might, after his death, serve as an introduction to the considerable volume of his works. Murillo was in his illustrious late middle age when he painted the picture, and was incontestably the leading painter in Seville. Many of the city’s churches contained altarpieces by his hand, and such was the fame of his graceful Madonnas and endearing infant saints that his fame had eclipsed even that of his venerable compatriot Diego Velazquez.

The artist wears a sober black costume, lightened only by a beautifully painted collar of white lace. He is, every inch, the painter as gentleman. The high dome of his forehead, accentuated by the raking light that falls across his face, has perhaps been emphasised to stress that he is an intellectual, as well as the possessor of a single manual skill. On a stone ledge beside his likeness, he has disposed the tools of his trade. Brushes lie next to a palette on which various colours have been mixed, including a wonderfully vivid splodge of white that stands proud of the canvas – a thing represented, so to speak, by the actual thing that it is. Dividers and ruler symbolise his grasp of the mathematical principles that every true virtuoso of painting had to master in order to create spatially convincing perspective. A rolled up drawing has been included, presumably to indicate that the artist was a master of drawing, or disegno, regarded since the Renaissance as the foundation of all academic training and cornerstone of art – as essential to the structure of a painting as the skeleton is to the structure of the human body. This detail may in addition allude to Murillo’s role as co-founder of the Seville Academy, of which he was the first president.

He flaunts his prowess as a creator of subtle illusions by reaching a hand through and out of the stone frame within which his likeness is otherwise contained. The image of the artist is so lifelike that, like the statue of Galatea carved by Pygmalion, it threatens to come to life before the very eyes of the viewer. The Latin inscription just below the artist’s right hand, inscribed on a curved tablet of stone, may be translated as “Bart. Murillo portraying himself to fulfil the wishes and prayers of his children.” These lines indicate that this picture and that described by his biographer Palomino, when writing that “he painted his portrait at the request of his children, a marvellous thing”, are one and the same.

Murillo’s fame quickly spread throughout Europe after his death, so much so that an edict was passed in Seville in the mid-eighteenth century forbidding the removal or sale of any of his works still in the city. By then, the picture reproduced on this page had been England for more than two decades. It arrived in 1729, one of the first Murillos to reach the country, and its influence was soon felt – it was, for example, the model on which William Hogarth based his well known Self-Portrait with Pug, in Tate Britain. The work was owned by a number of leading British collectors, including the collection of the Prince of Wales before finding a permanent home in the National Gallery.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Murillo became something of a cult figure, one of a handful of universally admired artists and a painter whose name was flourished alongside those of Raphael and Michelangelo, Claude and Poussin, Rembrandt and Rubens. With Velazquez, he is the only Spanish artist to have been included in that mid-nineteenth century artists’ pantheon, the Podium of the Painters on the Albert Memorial. The few known facts about his life had been embroidered into a colourful and romantic myth. It was known that Murillo had been orphaned when he was eleven years old. There was also an early reference to him creating “pintando de feria”, which was taken to mean that he sold his works from a stall at Seville’s annual fair, when in fact it probably just referred to his activities in some obscure part of the Seville art trade. The legend grew up that Murillo had been something of a picaresque adventurer, ducking and diving his way through life. This legend was given its most extreme expression by the Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt, in some lines written about another, slightly earlier self-portrait by Murillo: “Look at these splendid, slightly pouting lips! Do they not reveal the man of action! These slightly retracted nostrils, these flashing eyes under the splendid, wrathfully arching eyebrows, this whole face, is it not an arsenal of passions? … Happy the woman who has been loved by this man! His mouth has been kissed a lot, I believe…”

Subsequent research has shown that the truth about Murillo was rather less dramatic. There is no evidence to suggest that he kissed anyone much other than his wife, whom he married in 1645, and with whom he had nine children – only four of whom are know to have been alive when she died, in 1663, shortly after giving birth to the last of them. He never remarried. He appears to have been a deeply pious man, to judge not only from the evidence of his art, but from the fact that he was a member of both the Franciscan Third Order and Seville Brotherhood of Charity. His life cannot have been a particularly easy one, given that he lost more than half of his children to one ailment or another, and lost his wife when she was barely forty years old. Life was hard for most ciitizens of Seville at the time. Numerous outbreaks of plague reduced the population of the city from about 120,000 to 60,000 during Murillo’s lifetime, and in many of its neighbourhoods the city became little more than a ghost town. If I had to characterise Murillo, on the basis of this portrait, I would say that he was no passionate, romantic vagabond, but a proud albeit slightly weary painter, well aware of his own considerable abilities. Looking into his eyes, as he no doubt intended his children to do, after his death, what do we see? A mixture of affection, self-reliance and stoicism – tinged, perhaps, by the melancholy of having lived through so much death and loss.