ITP 49: Three Boys Playing Dice, by Bartolome Esteban Murillo

Date: 25-03-2001
Owning Institution: Munich, Alte Pinakothek
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: Renaissance        

On Mothering Sunday, this week’s picture is a work specifically created to evoke compassion for the child who has no mother. Three Boys Playing Dice was painted by the extravagantly gifted and equally pious Spanish artist Bartolome Esteban Murillo between approximately 1675 and 1680, not long before the end of his life. It is widely regarded as the archetypal example of a genre that Murillo made his own, the so-called “beggar-boy picture”.

In painting such works, the artist drew on his own frequent encounters with the many ragged urchins who roamed the streets of his native Seville. The number of destitute and homeless children at large in the city had multiplied alarmingly during the course of Murillo’s lifetime, due to a succession of natural disasters. Plague struck in 1649, halving the population of the city, and again in 1678, its devastating effects being compounded by crop failures, widespread famine, an epidemic of typhus and a great earthquake. Devout and well-to-do citizens like Murillo, who made his name and fortune principally as a painter of altarpieces and other large-scale religious works, formed themselves into organisations devoted to alleviating the general state of social crisis. In 1662 the painter became a member of the Franciscan Third Order, and in 1665 he joined the Seville Brotherhood of Charity. One of the tasks he undertook on behalf of the brotherhood was the distribution of bread. The sight of a destitute child stuffing food into his mouth, so vividly depicted in the picture shown here, must have been very familiar to him. The Christian connotations of the bread being so hungrily devoured would not have been lost on the painter’s devout Sevillian audience. As the scholar Peter Cherry remarks in a fascinating essay, “Murillo’s Genre Scenes and Their Context”: “bread was food and sacrament, providing both bodily and spiritual sustenance…”

The son of a barber-surgeon, Murillo had himself been orphaned at the age of eleven. The youngest of 14 children, he was subsequently brought up by one of his older sisters, Ana. Much later in life, when Murillo’s wife suddenly died, Ana came to his aid once more, helping the brother she had raised to raise his own children, or at least the four out of nine – three sons and a congenitally deaf daughter – who survived the appallingly high infant mortality rates of the time. Three Boys Playing Dice communicates Murillo’s unusually strong sense of the fragility of human existence. The children are placed in a desolate no-man’s-land, perhaps somewhere on the outskirts of the city. Whatever lies behind them has been reduced, by the painter, to a misty void, while everything that surrounds them – the broken pitcher, the tumbledown fragments of a ruined, ivy-clad building, the ripe fruit in the wicker basket at their feet – seems designed to speak of transience, flux and mutability.

Murillo’s painting may also have put his original audience in mind of characters familiar to them in contemporary literature, notably the type of picaresque novels that were extremely popular in Spain at the time. The hero of such books was, typically, the picaro, a romantic young vagabond constantly struggling to find his next meal, whose colourful adventures usually involved flirting with a life of crime (Oliver Twist, although written several centuries later, is probably the most famous English equivalent to the picaresque novel). Such lively young scallywags were regarded less with disapproval than envy, by the literate and socially secure readership that enjoyed their exploits. Exempted from social responsibility, they inhabited an admittedly imaginary world of freedom. “Little money, few cares,” in the words of a Spanish proverb of the time. So while Murillo’s motherless children were seen as objects of pity there was also, perhaps, a trace of jealousy there too.

The “beggar-boy pictures” have often been compared with similar types of genre painting being produced in the Netherlands at the time. During the seventeenth century there was a constant traffic of goods, people and ideas between Seville and Flanders (then still a Spanish dominion). One of Murillo’s leading patrons was a merchant and art collector originally from Antwerp called Nicolas Omazur, so the artist almost certainly saw at least one or two typically Dutch pictures of vagrants and other ne’er-do-wells by painters such as Brouwer and Teniers. But while sharing the subject matter of his Netherlandish contemporaries, Murillo treated it in a very different way. In Dutch art boys playing at dice for money were almost invariably shown as juvenile delinquents in the making, in order to reinforce the proverbial distrust of idle hands doing the devil’s work. That dimension of moralising disapproval seems entirely absent from Murillo’s work. The painter notes the children’s involvement in their game with compassion, even a kind of tenderness, painting the contentment of the thrower (who has just scored a winning nine) as well as the dawning disappointment of the loser with completely convincing psychological and physiognomical accuracy. The game itself seems less to symbolise the childrens’ attraction to vice, than the uncertainty of their situation. The life of the street urchin after all was itself a game of dice, and for every survivor another fell by the wayside.

There is nothing grotesque or caricatured about the two dice-players, no trace of the incriminating coarseness characteristic of similar figures in Dutch art. If anything, the opposite is true. Despite one or two eloquent touches of realism – notably the tattered shoe and grimy protruding toes of the boy nearest to us – Murillo seems bent on idealising his subjects. He has transfigured their rags into elegant folds of baroque drapery. Seen through the benevolent eyes of Christian charity, the children themselves are presented as affectingly innocent, almost cherub-like creatures. The idea that children and poor people are closest to God was a commonplace throughout Post-Counter-Reformation Europe, and especially strong in Spain. After all, Christ had chosen to live among the poor, counselling his followers that “Unless you be converted and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of Heaven.” I suspect Murillo had those words in mind when he painted his picture.