Part 2

The painter's studio was now thronged with the _élite_ of Seville, by the crowds that muster when genius has been acclaimed by responsible parties and they need have no fear of their own taste. The man who had painted _pinturas de la feria_ only three years ago could now choose his own commissions. He made the best use of his opportunities, and, a couple of years after his work for the Franciscans had given him a start in life, he married Dona Beatrice de Cabrera y Sotomayor. A portrait by Murillo said to be of the lady, is in the collection of Sir J. Stirling-Maxwell, but, seen through the medium of a photograph, it does nothing to explain why the painter married her. Perhaps the facts that she was of noble family, and had wealth, may be trusted to provide the key. Her flatterers could hardly have said that she was attractive. In the picture she wears a mantilla, and a flower in her hair after the fashion of the Sevillana, and looks as though she seldom suffered from good temper, but if the portrait does stand for the painter's wife, it is only fair to add that we have no record to suggest that she was as difficult as she appears here. The suggestion that one of his later portraits of a really attractive woman represents his mistress is not supported sufficiently to convince us.

Down to the year of his return to Seville the painter's work is of small importance, and in all probability the most of it has been lost. In a country where the wealthy were better prepared to buy pictures than to attach any importance to those who painted them, it is hardly likely that the rough immature efforts of the painter who sought his patrons at the weekly Fair would command attention. Critics of Murillo divide his works into three periods, the first dating from 1646 to 1652, when his outlines were hard and the background lacked depth, and the colouring was more or less metallic. Following this came a short period of transition lasting till 1656, when more of the individuality behind the brush becomes expressed on the canvas, and one does not see the joints in the composition, or the definite effects by which the colour scheme has been secured. From 1656 Murillo may be said to have entered into his kingdom, to have expressed his conception of Holy Family and saints as they occurred to his mind, to stand outside the conventions that had fettered him hitherto. Some hold that these changes were merely the result of constant study, but the writer inclines to a strong belief that they were more than the fruit of mere technical efficiency. The painter was turning more and more from things of earth, to what he held to be things of Heaven, his emotional nature was responsive to the ceremonial of the Church, and to the lives of its worthiest representatives. Nearly all his work was done, whether directly or indirectly, in the service of the Faith, and he learned devoutly to believe in the miracles he was asked to express on canvas. Then it was that he sought to represent female forms of simple but enduring beauty, making luminous the surrounding air, angels hovering over saints, little cherubs, whose feet had never touched our own hard earth, smiling from folds of the Madonna's robes.

Unconsciously, perhaps, he was doing as the Florentine and Venetian painters of the Renaissance had done before him; he was studying the motherhood and childhood in the streets around him, and transferring it with sure touch and reverent hand to his canvas. Small wonder then that his work in the latter days went home more directly than ever to the people among whom he lived, and that they looked upon Murillo as they looked upon the Cathedral, or the Giralda Tower, as a monument to their city and an instruction to strangers. To this day in the ancient city if you would praise a work of art of any description, you say it is a Murillo, _i.e._ a masterpiece. Perhaps the source of the painter's struggle gives us also the key-note to his weakness. The Church gave him faith and commissions, but it also imposed upon him a certain stilted handling of his subjects. His angels and cherubs came from the streets around his home, and sometimes one feels that they are a little tired, a little intolerant of the pose he has inflicted upon them, and are anxious to return to less unnatural surroundings. For all his facility he had no daring; he felt and uttered the restrictions that the Church imposed. Do not let us blame him for this, we should rather remember his achievement in humanising the heavenly host than his failure to make it human without self-consciousness. Only a wider training and a deeper knowledge in many directions could have freed his brush, but had it been too free, he would have found his occupation gone. There must have been zealous churchmen who looked askance at many of his pictures, for the bulk of these clerics could hardly have looked at art save through the narrowing glasses of theology. To estimate the debt that Spanish art owes to Murillo, let us look at the representation of the subjects he made his own by any of the men who preceded him.

Although Murillo was so largely concerned with sacred art and religious feeling that his pictures for religious houses are largely in excess of all others, he took an intelligent interest in the social and artistic life around him. His home became one of the centres of intellectual communion in a city that has never devoted itself altogether to affairs of the mind, and he associated with the heads of Sevillian society in and out of the Church. The old lean years were far behind him, his pictures commanded the highest prices in the city, and were in demand beyond its boundaries, though it is extremely unlikely that he left Seville for long at any time. He may have gone as far as Cadiz, before he went to his death there, but that would have been the extreme limit of his excursions. Now and again by way of relaxation he painted a landscape--there are one or two in Madrid which have not yet been explained away by critics--and he painted portraits from time to time, though he preferred to give to some saint the features he was asked to record. Doubtless he felt that the Church had the first and final claims upon his services, and that he had no right to devote his time to secular subjects.

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PLATE VI.--A BOY DRINKING

(From National Gallery, London)

When Murillo was not concerned with Virgin, Saints or Martyrs, he loved to turn to the picturesque types of childhood that he found in the streets around him. He has undoubtedly brought more character, more humanity, and above all more movement into his child-life studies than into his sacred pictures. The National Gallery is the fortunate possessor of one of the painter's most successful studies of children, reproduced here.

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As his social influence and his opportunity for intercourse with leading contemporaries increased, he entertained the idea of establishing in Seville a Public Academy of Art. In pursuit of this idea he would have received the hearty encouragement of the ecclesiasts who looked upon art as a sure aid to devotion, and it may be that their assistance contributed largely to the success of the inaugural meeting held in Seville in the beginning of the year 1660, when a score or more of the leading painters of Andalusia drew up the constitution of the new body, and elected Murillo and the younger Herrera as joint Presidents. Students were to be admitted on payment of what they could afford, and the suggestion that the Church was supporting the new venture is justified by the fact that every student was required to abjure profanity and profess his orthodoxy by reciting an established formula. The Presidents devoted a week in turn to the Academy, teaching, criticising, and advising, and the struggling young artists of the city and its environs made haste to avail themselves of the chance of securing tuition and assistance. Herrera did not remain constant to his self-imposed task, and doubtless Murillo found it irksome, but the Academy was to no small extent the creation of his own brain, and he did his best for it, taking up the burden that his fellow president had laid aside. It is clear that he must have possessed some talent for organisation and administration; the Academy seems to have thrived as long as he was able to direct its affairs, but shortly after his death its doors were closed. Some of the Spanish writers who have had access to old papers and correspondence declare that Murillo's position was one of great difficulty from the first, that the jealousy of men who were older and less successful than he hampered him very considerably, and that many of his best intentioned efforts were thwarted. It is not difficult to understand that the painter's extraordinary career had provided him with plenty of detractors, and that his position at the head of the Academy would be resented by the elderly unsuccessful gentlemen who knew that the experiment was being watched from the highest quarters in Madrid.

It is not possible in this place to refer at any length to the important work executed by Murillo in the first fifteen years of his latest manner. To attempt such a task would be to compile a catalogue that could hardly be of interest, save to the few English lovers of Murillo, who know his work in National Gallery, Louvre, Prado, Hermitage, and the public and private collections in Seville. Let it suffice for the moment to point out that he had been honoured with commissions to paint pictures for the Cathedral of Seville, once a Temple to Venus, and possessing to this day, if the writer has been truly informed, dungeons wherein the officers of Holy Inquisition wrought their will upon the _corpus vile_ of the heretic. He decorated the Chapel Royal in honour of the canonisation of St. Ferdinand. In the Chapter Room of the Cathedral are eight portraits painted in oval for the dome. All are saints, six men and two women, the latter being St. Justa and St. Rufina, the patron saints of the city. In years to come Goya was asked to paint St. Justa and St. Rufina, and showed his respect for their sanctity by employing two courtesans to sit for the portraits; but this is another story, and belongs to the time of the French war and Ferdinand the Desired. There are countless studies of Christ in the Cathedral, one as a lad, another at the Baptism by St. John, a third in which the child Christ appears to St. Anthony of Padua, another after the scourging. The picture of Christ and St. Anthony was probably one of the finest of the master's works, but it has been vilely restored. As a rule, the gentlemen employed in Spain to restore masterpieces seem to have as much knowledge of art as the African witch doctor has of the healing art that is practised by a London Doctor of Medicine. It is only now and again, when one finds Murillo at his best in a picture that has defied the assaults of time, that one can realise what the cruel mercies of the restorer have done to obscure the painter's work. They have accentuated the obvious, turned sentiment into sentimentality, and made colour schemes lose their refinement. If Shakespeare's sonnets had been found mutilated, and had been restored by that "philosopher true," the late Martin Tupper, we should have had in literature a counterpart of the result we have here in art.

Beyond Murillo's highly important work in Seville Cathedral, attention must be called to the pictures he painted for the Church of Santa Maria la Blanca, the Convent of the Capuchins, and the Caridad. Only one of them, a "Last Supper," not in the painter's best manner, remains there to-day; but the splendid semicircular picture of the Conception, now in the Louvre, was painted for Santa Maria la Blanca, and hung there until Marshal Soult cast his rapacious, but well cultivated, regard upon it; and in the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, where so many of the fine Goyas are preserved, we can see two others, "The Dream" and "The Senator and his Wife before the Pope." The story set out is founded upon the legend of a Roman Senator and his wife, who being childless vowed to leave their wealth to the Virgin. She appeared to them in a dream, the infant Christ in her arms, and bade them erect to her a church on the Esquiline, at a spot she indicated. To this dream the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome is said to owe its foundation. The two canvases stolen or annexed by Soult were returned to Spain after his death.

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PLATE VII.--THE NATIVITY

(From the Louvre, Paris)

On several occasions Murillo chose the Nativity for the subject of his great canvases. He was always safe to attract the admiration of his clients by his reverent treatment of a scene that left so much to the imagination of the artist. His pictures were very greatly admired by the French invaders of Spain, and it was to Marshal Soult that many Frenchmen owed their first introduction to Murillo.

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The Caridad, a well-managed hospital, scrupulously clean, light and airy, thrives to-day on the banks of the Guadalquivir, close to the Tower of the Gold, and doubtless the writer is but one of many who have spent long hours there, content to endure the sights and sounds of suffering for the sake of the remnant of work that still graces the wall of church and hospital. There would be much more than can be seen to-day but for the visits of the indefatigable Marshal Soult, who had such a penchant for the master's work that neither Cathedral nor hospital could guard it from his eyes and hands. It is easy enough to study Murillo in the public galleries, but it seems more satisfactory to see his canvases in the places for which they were painted, and a special interest attaches to the hospital of the Caridad, because it was founded by one of the men whom an age of devout belief is apt to produce from time to time--a desperate sinner turned saint. Don Miguel Manara of Calatrava, born a few years after Murillo, was a man of pleasure who wasted his substance in riotous living. One night as he was reeling home from a debauch he saw a funeral procession approaching him, the open bier surrounded by torch-bearing priests. "Whom do you carry to the grave?" he cried, and one of the priests replied, "Don Miguel Manara." Greatly terrified, the profligate looked at the corpse and recognised the features as his own. Then he knew no more until morning broke and he found himself in a church. Had he lived in this prosaic age his friends would have taken him to a nursing home to enjoy the benefits of bromide and a rest cure, but two hundred and fifty years ago a man had to work out his own salvation. He did so very thoroughly, turned from a profligate to a devotee and, after infinite labour, founded the hospital and church of the Caridad on the ruins of an early building of the same character. It is a splendid institution, and preserves to this day the character proposed by its founder, whose anxious careworn face looks at us from the canvas painted by Juan de Valdes in the Cabilda. Murillo painted ten or eleven pictures for the Church of San Jorge attached to the hospital; three remain: one is in Madrid, and two are in the town house of the Duke of Sutherland. Perhaps the "Moses" is the best of those that remain, but the Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, now in Madrid, is a master work.

Gratitude for such favours as he had received would appear to have been one of the painter's characteristics, and may be held accountable for the splendid effort on behalf of the Franciscans, who in early days had given the commission that made him famous. When the brethren appealed to him in 1673 he was a rich man, and able to work as cheaply as in the days when every real was worth saving. The Convent, then on the outskirts of the city, had taken forty years or more in the building. Now it needed decoration, and the brethren did not appeal in vain to the greatest ecclesiastical painter of the day. We do not know his fee, but we do know that he devoted six years to his task. Upwards of a score of pictures testified at once to his devotion and to his skill, for they are among the best he has painted, and happily the most of them are to be seen in the Murillo Salon of the Seville Museum. The brethren of St. Francis, though they made one or two exchanges of the kind that Glaucus made with Diomedes, had the sense to put the canvases they elected to preserve beyond the reach of Marshal Soult, and the Salon of Trabella holds _inter alia_ the "St. Francis at the foot of the Cross," "Justa and Rufina," "St. Thomas of Villanueva," and two Conceptions. It will be remembered that the Papal Edict declaring the Immaculacy of the Mother of God was issued in the year of Murillo's birth, and doubtless many a devout Catholic believed that the painter was given to Spain as a reward to Philip IV. by whose strenuous endeavour Pope Paul V. had issued his momentous decree.

The pictures painted for the Franciscans were held by Murillo's contemporaries to place a crown upon his achievements. Brilliant as his work had been for the Cathedral and the Caridad, for the hospital known as Los Venerables, and for the Church of the Augustines, the Franciscans were held to have been the most fortunate of all the painter's patrons, and his pictures gave an immense stimulus to the labours of the Church. The Capuchins of Cadiz besought him to journey to their city and to paint some pictures for their house. He had already reached a great age and an assured position, and no pecuniary recompense that the Capuchin Friars had to offer could have drawn him from his beloved native city; but the temptation to work for the greater glory of God was irresistible, and he set out. It was an unfortunate journey. While engaged on a picture of the marriage of Santa Catherine, he stumbled in mounting the scaffolding, and ruptured himself badly. Suffering great pain, and unable or unwilling to describe his condition precisely, he was brought back to Seville, and we may feel assured that the journey must have aggravated his symptoms. His children and friends did all they could to alleviate his sufferings, but in those days of elemental knowledge rupture was not readily diagnosed, nor was there any effective treatment. We are told that the dying man was taken every day to the Church of the Holy Cross, where he prayed beneath the shadow of Campana's "Descent." Feeling that his end was upon him he sent for all his family and friends, and with the evening of April 3, 1682, the end came. He was buried under Campana's "Descent from the Cross," and his funeral afforded an occasion for all classes of Seville to show how greatly they respected the distinguished dead. He left but little money, though he had some real estate and a valuable collection of plate and pictures. By his will he left instructions that four hundred masses were to be said for the repose of his soul--a generous allowance surely for one whose life was singularly free from blame. His wife had predeceased him, but his sister, for whom he had laboured in the far-off early days, survived; she had married a distinguished man of noble birth. His children were two sons and a daughter; the elder son was in the West Indies: the second, who took to art, died before middle age.

You may find his work in all the great galleries to-day, but to know Murillo intimately one must go to Spain--to Seville and Madrid for choice. France boasts a fine collection, and many of those that adorn our National Gallery, Dulwich and Wallace Collections, are worthy of the painter. In Rome, Florence, Dresden, Munich, Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg he is represented by work that demands attention. Doubtless much of his output has been lost, much has been restored to death, some pictures remain to be discovered, but it should not be difficult to compile a list of 500 pictures painted by Murillo, the greater part in the third or "vaporoso" manner, and painted in the last twenty-five years of his life. Had he not received the commission from Cadiz, or had he refused to accept it, we may suppose that his output would have been considerably greater than it was, for he was in excellent health, was a conscientious worker, and was painting his finest pictures. He has enabled us to know what manner of man he was by the records of his life, by his work, and by several portraits of himself that he painted. Two are in England. One of the painter in his youth was bought by Sir Francis Cook at the Louis Philippe sale in 1853, and is now at Doughty House; another painted in later years is in Lord Spencer's famous collection at Althorp. There are said to be others on the Continent; one, said by those who have seen it to be the best of all, was formerly in the Louvre, but its present resting-place is not known to the writer. The artist suffers to-day from the fact that Velazquez was his contemporary, and from the indiscriminate praise of those who became acquainted with him for the first time when Soult came back from the wars. His panegyrists ignored or never saw his weakness, the theatrical posing of his figures, the ever-recurring sacrifice of reason to sentiment, of strength to prettiness. His detractors, on the other hand, have blinded themselves to the beauty of his conceptions, the skill of his compositions, the exquisite quality of his colouring, and the spirit of genuine belief that kept a subject from becoming hackneyed, even when he had painted it a score of times. He did repeat himself; if we are not mistaken he has more than a score of canvases known to-day, setting out the story of the Immaculate Conception. The writer has seen some ten or twelve in Spain and France, and though the treatment is fairly uniform, each has been the object of the artist's most meticulous handling; indeed, it is on this account that the central figure lacks the charm that comes to the little angels clinging round her.

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PLATE VIII.--THE MARRIAGE OF THE VIRGIN

(From the Wallace Collection)

This is a panel-picture of considerable merit, full of charm and very sincerely felt. As is customary with Murillo, the grouping is better than the colouring, which has a certain tendency to crudity, not altogether restrained by the limits of the canvas.

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