A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools. National Gallery (Great Britain)

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      Bartolomé Estéban Murillo, the most widely popular of the Spanish painters, was himself sprung from the "people." He was born of humble parents in Seville, and his earliest attempts at art were pictures for fairs. He is also believed to have supplied some of the Madonnas which were shipped off by loads for the convents in Mexico51 and Peru. A turning-point in his artistic career came, however, when a certain Pedro de Moya came into the studio of Murillo's uncle, Castillo. De Moya had been studying under Van Dyck in London. Van Dyck's style was a revelation to Murillo, who determined forthwith to start off on the grand tour. First, however, he went to Madrid, where Velazquez helped him greatly. His studies there were so successful, and his popularity became so great, that the foreign journey was abandoned. He married a lady of fortune, his house became a centre of taste and fashion, commissions poured in upon him, and in 1660 he formed the Academy of Seville. His life was as pious as it was busy. He was often seen praying for long hours in his parish church, and in his last illness (which was brought on by his falling, in a fit of absence of mind, from a scaffold) he was carried every day to pray before Pedro Campaña's "Descent from the Cross." "I wait here," he said to the sacristan who asked one day if he were ready to go, "till the pious servants of our Lord have taken him down."

      Murillo was thus one of the last sincerely religious painters – a class which, "after a few pale rays of fading sanctity from Guido, and brown gleams of gipsy Madonnahood from Murillo, came utterly to an end" (Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. iv. § 4). But it was "gipsy Madonnahood": there is an entire want of elevation in his religious types, and the peasants whom he painted as beggars or flower-girls he painted also as angels or Virgins. This mingling of the common with the religious alike in subject and treatment was no doubt a principal reason of his great popularity in his own country.52 His vulgarity of treatment in his favourite beggar subjects is best seen in the Dulwich Gallery; of his religious style, the pictures here are characteristic examples. There is a certain "sweetness" and sentimentality about them which often makes them immensely popular. The French in particular are subject to a furore for Murillo, his "Immaculate Conception," now in the Louvre, having been bought in 1852 for £23,440 – the largest sum ever given up to that time for a single picture.53 With children, too, Murillo is nearly always a great favourite. A maturer taste, however, finds the sentiment of Murillo overcharged, and the sweetness of expression an insufficient substitute for elevation of character. "His drawing," says Ruskin, "is free and not ungraceful, but most imperfect and slurred to give a melting quality of colour. That colour is agreeable because it has no force or severity; but it is morbid, sunless, and untrue. His expression is sweet, but shallow; his models amiable, but vulgar and mindless; his chiaroscuro commonplace, opaque, and conventional; and yet all this is so agreeably combined, and animated by a species of wax-work life, that it is sure to catch everybody who has not either very high feeling or strong love of truth, and to keep them from obtaining either" (Letter to Dean Liddell, given in the Memoir by H. L. Thompson, p, 224.)54 "Murillo," says a more appreciative critic, "who assimilated least of foreign elements, had become the most international of all Spanish painters; for he possessed the art of winning the favour of all, the gift of a language intelligible to all times and peoples, to all classes and even to aliens of his faith" (Justi: Velazquez and his Times, p. 236). One charm his pictures have which no criticism is likely to take away: they are all stamped with the artist's individuality; there is never any mistaking a Murillo.

      "His ships, having hulls of a shape something between a cocoanut and a high-heeled shoe, balanced on their keels on the top of the water, with some scaffolding and cross-sticks above, and a flag at the top of every stick, form perhaps the purest exhibition of human inanity and fatuity which the arts have yet produced. The harbours also, in which these model navies ride, are worthy of all observation for the intensity of the false taste which, endeavouring to unite in them the characters of pleasure-ground and port, destroys the veracity of both. There are many inlets of the Italian seas where sweet gardens and regular terraces descend to the water's edge; but these are not the spots where merchant vessels anchor, or where bales are disembarked. On the other hand, there are many busy quays and noisy arsenals upon the shores of Italy; but queens' palaces are not built upon the quays, nor are the docks in any wise adorned with conservatories or ruins. It was reserved for the genius of Claude to combine the luxurious with the lucrative, and rise to a commercial ideal, in which cables are fastened to temple pillars, and lighthouses adorned with rows of bean-pots" (Harbours of England, pp. 17, 18). Notice, lastly, the "atrocious error in ordinary perspective" in the quay on the СКАЧАТЬ