BARTOLOMÉ ESTEBAN MURILLO
On this day of 1st January, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (baptized January 1, 1618 – April 3, 1682) was born in Seville or in Pilas, Spain.
He was a Baroque painter. Although he is best known for his religious works, Murillo also produced paintings of contemporary women and children.
After his parents died when he was 9 years old, he became a ward of his sister's husband, Juan Agustín Lagares. Murillo seldom used his father's surname, and instead took his surname from his maternal grandmother, Elvira Murillo.
Murillo began his art studies in Seville under Juan del Castillo. His first works were influenced by Francisco de Zurbarán, Jusepe de Ribera, and Alonso Cano. He became familiar with Flemish painting and of Molanus (Ian van der Meulen or Molano). As his painting developed, his more important works evolved towards the polished style that suited the bourgeois and aristocratic tastes of the time.
At the age of 26, he moved to Madrid, he became familiar with the work of Velázquez, the rich colors and softly modeled forms of his subsequent work suggest these influences.
He painted eleven canvases for the convent of St. Francisco el Grande in Seville.
Following the completion of a pair of pictures for the Seville Cathedral, he began to specialize in the themes that brought him his greatest successes: the Virgin and Child and the Immaculate Conception.
He was one of the founders of the Academia de Bellas Artes (Academy of Art), sharing its direction with the architect Francisco Herrera the Younger.
Artists influenced by his style included Gainsborough and Greuze.
He died in Seville, a few months after he fell from a scaffold while working on a fresco at the church of the Capuchines in Cádiz.
His public collections are at The Museo del Prado, Madrid; Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia, Wallace Collection, London, Basilica of St. Joseph Proto-Cathedral, Bardstown Kentucky, Timken Museum of Art, San Diego. Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, Illinois., Mabee-Gerrer Museum of Art, Shawnee, Oklahoma, and the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
