Murillo Part 1

Murillo.

by S. L. Bensusan.

I

There have been long years in which the name of Bartolome Esteban, known to the world as Murillo, was one to conjure with. Velazquez, El Greco, Ribera, Zurburan, Goya, were long uncertain in their appeal, recognised only by the enlightened among their contemporaries and ignored by the great majority of their fellow-countrymen. The pendulum of taste swings slowly from one extreme to the other, and, as the moods and needs of men change so they cast their idols into the dust, where they remain until another generation restores what it can find to the old pedestals. Nowadays Murillo has fallen from his high estate among the elect; they prefer to magnify his shortcomings rather than to acknowledge his many merits, to ignore the splendid service he rendered to Spanish art and the profound effect of his pictures in drawing countless simple souls within the sheltering folds of the Church. The fifty years of his devoted labours count for nothing, the self-searching and criticism that enabled the painter to move from a low plane to a high one are forgotten. This is not as it should be.

Bartolome Esteban Murillo had his limitations, but remains, despite them all, one of the world's teachers, and such glimpses of his life as may be seen through the shadows of some two hundred and fifty years reveal him as a serious artist who added to splendid natural gifts a steadfastness of purpose, a determination to do his best, a love of Andalusia, and a devotion to the religion in which he was brought up that must compel the admiration of thinking men however critical, and enable the artist to stand alone. In the early years of his sojourn he suffered from the pinch of poverty. He was born when Diego de Silva Velazquez was just about to enter upon his splendid career, in fact, Murillo would have been about five years old when his great contemporary left Seville for Madrid. Perhaps if we could see with understanding eyes we might be tempted to believe that the less distinguished artist enjoyed the happier life, for Velazquez in the court of kings had much to endure that never troubled the younger man who laboured in the service of the King of kings, and may have seen such visions as lightened the labours of Beato Angelico in the Convent of the Dominicans of St. Anthony in Padua, and St. Francis in a.s.sisi.

For the best of Murillo's canvases whisper to us of inspiration, of devout belief, and of an overmastering love for the "Maria santissima,"

and when the simple-hearted painter saw that his work brought honour to the cathedrals and convents for which he laboured he must have felt that his art was its own exceeding great reward.

PLATE II.--THE BEGGAR GIRL

(From the Dulwich Gallery)

We should prefer to call this picture the Flower-seller, for the girl is not really a beggar at all. Her clothes are worn with some approach to nicety, and she carries roses that command a ready sale in Seville if the seller be attractive and young. Murillo has given us a very charming type of Spanish girl, and has obtained some striking colour harmonies.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Plate II.--THE BEGGAR GIRL]

To this day Andalusia is a country of dreamers, and Seville, despite its electric trams and motor cars, its barracks and cosmopolitan hostelries, is _par excellence_ the city of dreams. How much more so then, three hundred years ago, when Murillo was born to enjoy its beauty? In Seville wealth is a mere accident, even the poor may return thanks without mental reservation for the nugatory gift of life. Faith flourishes to-day in the agnostic generation as of old time, blended with what we would regard as superst.i.tion, but sharing this fault with all the Latin countries. In the Cathedral and the Caridad, to say nothing of smaller religious houses, the pictures of Murillo still remind us that to the Catholic religion the world owes the wors.h.i.+p of a woman. To Murillo, G.o.d and the Virgin were not pale abstractions; they were his father and his mother, for he was hardly more than ten years old when his earthly parents fell victims to one of the epidemics so common in Europe in days when sanitation and isolation were not understood.

For twenty years, the most impressionable of his life, Murillo lived alone. Those who sneer at his work in these early times ignore the conditions under which it was done, forget that the cost of canvas and pigment was a very serious item in his exchequer, and that his reward was of the smallest. Wealth never came his way until he was no longer quite young, but as his circ.u.mstances became easier he did all that in him lay to express his message more completely and, while his labour was unremitting, his last work was his best, and included masterpieces that may hold their own in any company, even though it include the masters before whom artist and layman bow the head. Murillo has been cheapened by forgers and copyists who have succeeded in placing many of his shortcomings and very little of his quality on their hurried canvases. Every picture dealer in a Spanish city of any pretensions has a Murillo or two that he is prepared to vouch for even though the canvas gives the lie to his protestations. The artist's work has been used shamelessly for purposes of advertis.e.m.e.nt, it has paid the fullest penalties of popularity, and yet, a real Murillo in the best manner is a picture to which we can turn again and again, to find over and above the conquest of technical difficulties and the beauties of colour the qualities of imagination and inspiration that are a.s.sociated with the select few in every branch of creative work. One might go as far as to say that Seville would lose as much as Madrid if the Murillos were taken from the one and the Velazquez pictures from the other. There would be no hesitation on the writer's part to say as much if the capital of Andalusia had never been rifled of its proper store by the French conquerors of Spain. It is not in foreign galleries that one must go to see the work of a great artist, but in the city that was his home--the city wherein the sources of his inspiration linger and his pictures find an appropriate setting. Transplanting is not good for anything. The trees and flowers, the birds and beasts of a foreign land may endure in a clime for which they were not intended, but there is no more than an arrested growth; they cannot do justice to themselves. Frankly and without reserve we admit that Murillo was almost as much an Andalusian as a painter, but when we know his city and his work there, a fine picture in the National Gallery or the Louvre will bring Seville back to us as surely as a sea-sh.e.l.l brings back the ceaseless murmur of the waves.

II

THE ARTIST'S LIFE

Murillo came into the world with the close of the year 1617, and was baptized in a church destroyed during the French invasion nearly two hundred years later; the record of his baptism is preserved to-day in the Church of St. Paul. History is silent about his early years, but the authorities make it clear that his parents were among the very poorest of the city and that he was brought up in the old Jewish quarter, always the abiding place of indigence and suffering. In all probability he roamed the streets of the Triana and the Arrebola, little better off than the beggar boys who were destined to provide so much striking material for his brush. When his parents died of the plague that visited Seville the lad and his sister were adopted by an uncle who was a struggling doctor. Times were bad in spite of the epidemic; probably there was more demand than payment for medical services of the quality that Don Juan Lagares could offer: but his little nephew's cleverness with brush and pencil was too obvious to escape notice, and Don Juan del Castillo, one of the city's leading painters, was induced by the doctor to accept the lad as a pupil without payment of a fee.

In the studio of a moderately successful artist a pupil would be required to do menial work--to grind colours, clean brushes, sweep floors; he would pick up what he could of the master's methods when he had nothing else to do. It was no good apprentices.h.i.+p for a beginner whose youthful talent required direction from a bigger man, but beggars cannot be choosers, and doubtless uncle and nephew were grateful to Castillo, who has few claims upon our memory save in his capacity as master of Seville's great painter. He found a willing pupil whose work was admitted to some of the poorer religious houses in the city when he was only fifteen, and the relations between the two would seem to have been pleasant, for Murillo worked in the studio for ten years or more, and probably received some small regular payment in return for his services as soon as he had demonstrated their value. Then Juan del Castillo moved to Cadiz, and Murillo remained in Seville. Judging by his actions in years to come, he remained because the city was very dear to him; he would undoubtedly have been useful to his master, and beyond doubt the closing of Castillo's workshop left him at the age of twenty-three in dire financial straits. He had his sister to support, and the means of doing so were of the smallest, for he was only known to the poorer brethren of the Church who had few commissions to offer and very little to pay for them. The best paid work was in strong hands and, if no high dignitaries of the Church in Seville knew much about the struggling painter, it must be confessed that he had not done much to attract or to deserve attention. He was an artist in the making just then, and the making was a slow and painful process.

PLATE III.--THE HOLY FAMILY

(From the Louvre, Paris)

This is one of the masterpieces of the Paris collection, beautiful alike in conception, colouring and composition, with all the merits of the artist in evidence, and the most of his weaknesses conspicuous by their absence.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE III.--THE HOLY FAMILY]

Without the means for pursuit of serious study and with urgent need for present pence, the young painter was forced to do as the lowest members of his cla.s.s were doing, and he did work not unlike that with which needy gentlemen adorn street corners in our own year of grace. To be sure he did not choose a pitch and decorate it with busts of the reigning family, the ruling minister, a church, a s.h.i.+p at anchor, and a flock of sheep in a snowstorm, but he purchased the cheapest and coa.r.s.est cloth he could buy, cut it up, stretched it, and painted pictures for the Fair.

At least once a week there would be a Fair in the Triana or Macarena, every day would witness the arrival there of country farmers and dealers with something to buy or sell; and when a man's store or purse was full, when he had eaten well, and was conscious of the joy of life, he would often consent to become a patron of the arts in response to the pet.i.tion of some needy son of the brush who showed him a flaming, flaring picture of a Madonna or a Holy Family, or produced a piece of unspoilt saga-cloth and offered to paint a portrait almost as quickly as the itinerant photographer of Brighton beach or Margate sands can prepare the counterfeit of his victim with the aid of evil-smelling collodion plates. Such pictures were always to be bought at the Feria, though the writer has not found itinerant artists at the Fairs of either Seville or Cordova in the past few years--perhaps they can make more money by painting "genuine Murillos" for small dealers and owners of shops that sell second-hand goods. Doubtless, the young painter was a quick worker, his gifts in those days were readily expressed, and when he lacked a commission from any of the visitors to the Fair he prepared a few canvases for traders who sent them to the religious houses of South America, where the influence of Spain was so widely and heavily felt. It is not easy to guess how long he would have been content with such work, but when he had followed it for about two years a great change came into his life, and for the first time he became acquainted with better things.

In the studio or workshop of Juan del Castillo he had formed a friends.h.i.+p with a lad from Granada, one Pedro Moya, who, on leaving Castillo, seems to have followed art and war and to have served his native land in the Low Countries, where there were ample chances for the soldier of fortune who had the good luck to pa.s.s unscathed across the stricken field. Moya's talent was stimulated by a chance acquaintance with Van Dyck's work, and in order to study this great master he retired from the army and left for London, where Van Dyck, then in the last year of his life, admitted him as a pupil. When Van Dyck had pa.s.sed away, Moya found his occupation gone, so he left our fogbound sh.o.r.es for his native Andalusia, took up his residence in Seville, and renewed his friends.h.i.+p with his old friend and fellow-student. Murillo soon found in his friend's work qualities he had never seen before; they revealed the poverty of his own efforts, and filled him with an overmastering desire to travel and to learn. It was easier to feel the desire than to respond to it. Italy, then as now the Mecca of the Spanish artist, was far beyond his reach, but he had heard stories of the success that had come to his fellow-countryman Velazquez in Madrid, and thought that if he could go to him he would gain a little of the advice and instruction of which he stood so much in need. With this idea he entered into an arrangement with a picture exporter, who carried on a large trade with South America, and undertook to paint a large number of works at a special price. Working at high pressure he completed the order, received his pay, placed his young sister under the care of friends, and shook the dust of the Macarena from his feet. His road lay towards the North, and once in the capital of Spain, he presented himself before Velazquez.

We do not know much about the private life and character of the greatest of Spanish painters, but the little that is known is all to his credit. He did not hesitate to take the raw, ill-trained lad of five-and-twenty under his protection, though his only claims upon the Court painter were his talent and such kins.h.i.+p as may be said to exist between two men, the one distinguished, the other unknown, who hail from the same city. What Velazquez did was done thoroughly. As soon as he was satisfied of the _bona fides_ of his visitor, he gave him a home, examined his work, and pointed out its defects, procured his admission to the royal galleries, and advised him to copy the work of Ribera and Van Dyck. These opportunities were all Murillo required.

He could not have seen or hoped to see Velazquez very often, for the Court painter was a man whose leisure was much restricted, but he settled down to his work, and for two years or more was a painstaking copyist who lacked no opportunities. Velazquez, not content to do all he could unaided, had even shown his pupil's work to his own patron the Duke of Olivares then still at the zenith of his power and, either directly or through Olivares, had brought it before the notice of the king. When Velazquez returned from Lerida in 1644, Murillo had made so much progress that his patron thought he was quite fit to complete his studies in Italy, and offered him the necessary introductions and money.

All lovers of Murillo must wish that he had availed himself of the opportunity, but in the circ.u.mstances it is not altogether surprising that he did not. Doubtless, he had heard Seville calling through all the days and nights of his sojourn in Castile. Madrid is not a pleasant city to those who know the South, and then, too, the young painter would have been lonely, and must have remembered that his sister, his only near relative, would be anxiously awaiting his return.

He had learned a great deal; he may have felt that his gifts such as they were would secure him a good living in his own city, perhaps he felt he had a.s.similated as much as he could express for many years to come. We cannot tell what was in his mind, though to those of us who have fallen under the spell of Seville there is not much difficulty in forming an opinion about it, and we are inclined to think that his decision offended his splendid patron, for the two great Sevillians never met again. Henceforward Murillo's home was to be in the city of his birth, and his work was to be limited by the commissions that the city could yield him. Doubtless, he travelled gladly to the South to take up his residence in the Plaza de Alfaro, and display his latest work to men who might possibly become his patrons. He had left Seville unknown and undistinguished, now he had enjoyed the advantage of training under the greatest Sevillian of all.

PLATE IV.--MADONNA OF THE ROSARY

(From the Dulwich Gallery)

The Virgin sits enthroned, with the Holy Child on her knee and attendant cherubs at her feet. Her expression is full of sadness. The composition is admirably thought out and the colouring effective.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE IV.--MADONNA OF THE ROSARY]

He was still poor, and his poverty induced him to accept an ill-paid commission from the fathers of the Franciscan convent for eleven pictures. Fresh from the long course of study in Madrid, conscious that this his first chance might be his last if he did not do his best, he set to work and produced a series that roused the city to enthusiasm. Literally, he woke one morning to find himself famous.

The Franciscan convent was destroyed by fire in 1810, but the pictures were not lost, for Marshal Soult had carried off ten out of eleven, and the other had pa.s.sed into the gallery of a Spanish grandee on its way to this country. The French invaders of Spain were connoisseurs as well as soldiers, and in consideration of their _flair_ we may at this time of day overlook the shortcomings in their ethical code. Murillo had made the Franciscan convent famous; the Franciscans had put their painter beyond the reach of monetary trouble and had settled for him the lines his talent was to follow. The painter of a picture, like the writer of a book or a play, must pay this one tribute to success; he must do the work that the public looks for. Should he venture to discover himself in other directions his early patrons will turn and rend him. Happily the whole trend of this artistic talent was in the direction of sacred picture painting, and in the years that follow we find little else from his hand save a few portraits and a landscape or two of minor importance.

It may occur to the reader to ask what was the special quality of Murillo's work that made so prompt an appeal to his countrymen, and the answer is not far to seek. Hitherto sacred subjects had been dealt with in most unattractive fas.h.i.+on. Art, the handmaiden of the Church, had delighted in the presentation of ascetic figures as far removed from struggling humanity as the heavens are above the earth. Saints and martyrs looking as though they were newly escaped from the grip of the Inquisition were to be met with on every side; the virtues, the kindliness, and even the humanity of the lives of saints and devotees altogether were ignored. Murillo peopled his canvas with an entirely new cla.s.s of people, as human and as fascinating as the Sevillians themselves. On Murillo's canvases his fellow-countrymen saw no more long-drawn agonies of martyrdom, but gracious Madonnas and delightful Children, and Saints who had not been soured in the pursuit of righteousness. It was a revelation to Andalusia this strange new view of holiness, this mingling of the heavens with the earth, this insistence upon a common bond that united the aureoled saint with the sick beggar to whom he gave alms. Then, too, the rich almost sensuous colouring of the new work was a quality hitherto unknown to Seville, although we may wonder why some of the Spaniards from other cities, who may have been warm colourists, had not been attracted to sun-loving Seville, where they could have created an immediate market for work that responded to the unvarying humour of the people.

PLATE V.--THE BEGGAR BOY

(From the Dulwich Gallery)

The little gallery near Dulwich College, some five miles away from the boundaries of the City of London, is rich in works by Murillo. This study of a beggar boy possesses more than the interest created by the artist's clever treatment of shadow and light, the happiness of the posing and the skilled brushwork. It reveals the truth that between the beggar of nigh three hundred years ago and to-day there is little or no difference in Spain. You may meet this child to-day in and round the Andalusian country the painter knew so well.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE V.--THE BEGGAR BOY]

The painter's studio was now thronged with the _elite_ 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 n.o.ble 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 gla.s.ses 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.