Bartolome Murillo was born in Seville, Spain on January 1, 1617 and was orphaned at the age of ten.  He studied under Juan del Castillo.  By the age of twenty-three he was already painting on his own and selling his pictures itinerantly at fairs in Seville. His early works are somewhat clumsy and heavy in color.

He visited Madrid between 1641 and 1644, at which time he could have studied and profited by the works of Rubens, Van Dyck, Titian and Correggio which were to be seen there. This would explain his increasingly harmonious color, the subtler atmosphere and the freer brushwork which soon began to characterize his style. He worked for a time in 1642 under Velasquez in Madrid.

In 1660 he became the first president of the Seville Academy of Painting, but resigned from office five years later. In 1665 he began a series of twenty-two pictures for the altars of the church of the Capuchin Convent. In 1682, while at work on a painting for the high altar of the Capuchin Church of Cadiz, he fell from the scaffold and sustained injuries which hastened his death.

Written and submitted by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.

Sources include:
Masterpieces of Art; Catalogue of the New York World's Fair 1940
Timken Art Gallery Catalogue
Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures: Masters of Spanish Painting