One of the most famous of 17th-century Spanish painters, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo led an outwardly uneventful life in the southern Spanish city of Seville. Although it is undocumented, he must have made a trip to Madrid in the late 1640s, for only in that city’s royal collections could he have seen paintings by the Venetian masters Titian and Paolo Veronese as well as the Flemish masters Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck—artists who had an unmistakable stylistic influence on his work, particularly its warm, at times excessively lush, colors.

Murillo is renowned mainly as a painter of religious subjects, especially the life of the Virgin, and genre scenes of Seville’s lower classes, which he portrayed with empathy and affection. His religious pictures contain elements from everyday life and are highly emotional, verging on the sentimental. His works, reproduced in vast numbers, notably his versions of The Good Shepherd, The Immaculate Conception, and The Holy Family, helped shape the image of Spanish Catholic piety well into the 20th century. A devoutly religious man, by 1655 Murillo was Seville’s most respected painter and in 1660 he established a drawing and painting academy in the city. A fall while painting in the Capuchin Church led to his death.