Murillo hits London

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Sarah Lawson visits two shows currently devoted to the Spanish master of (among other things) the dirty feet

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–82) is enjoying a sudden vogue in London. Two important galleries north and south of the Thames are featuring the Spaniard’s paintings from their respective collections until 12 and 19 May respectively, and they are both worth seeing.

Although Murillo never left his native Seville, his reputation in his own time spread outside Spain. Sincerely devout himself, he painted huge canvases for local churches and others – works eagerly collected in Italy and the Low Countries, partly because foreign merchants in Seville and Cádiz returned home with pictures that were then admired in Milan or Antwerp.

A product of the Counter-Reformation, Murillo seems very much in tune with the thinking of the Catholic Church at the time, post Council of Trent. (The damage-control Council of Trent [1545–63] decided that art would be the best propaganda to use against the Protestants.)

At the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square you can find ten pictures reflecting the 19th-century taste for Murillo’s very human depictions of the Holy Family or the Virgin and Child, and in particular the taste of the 4th Marquess of Hertford, who liked pretty, uplifting pictures. Even in the most exalted scenes, swarming with winged cherubim, there are homely details and touches of genuine humanity.

You’re not going to find any Beheadings of Holofernes here! If there is a jarring note at all, it is a scene of Joseph’s brothers about to throw him down a well (Genesis 37) in the moments before a caravan passes and they decide to sell him into slavery instead. The scene is lit dramatically with none of the soft hazy colours associated with Murillo’s late work. Joseph and his Brethren (c. 1665-70) is lit from the left, with Joseph the only figure shown whole – the ten wicked brothers have dramatically highlighted arms, legs and faces.

A Nativity scene shows the usual shepherds and animals, including a cow placidly gazing out at the viewer. The barefoot shepherds could be real Spanish shepherds in their tattered work clothes. One shepherd sits on the ground with the dirty soles of his feet toward the viewer. It would seem that if Murillo had been an early anonymous painter he might now be known as the Master of the Dirty Feet, for the pictures on show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery also have some fine examples of barefoot peasants. The taste at the Dulwich reflects a late 18th-century taste, by which Murillo was also highly regarded for his down-to-earth scenes of village life with beggars and lively little boys. Instead of the chubby cherubs and putti of the religious paintings we have real street urchins.

Dulwich was bequeathed 13 Murillo pictures by Sir Francis Bourgeois (1753–1811), but only four of them have proved to be genuine Murillos. The others have gradually been reattributed to other artists whom he influenced. The Dulwich exhibition, ‘Murillo and Justino de Neve: the Art of Friendship’, pays tribute to Murillo’s patron, the canon of the cathedral of Seville. The Dulwich Murillos are more varied than those at the Wallace Collection, which are uniformly Biblical scenes – even the apocryphal ‘Marriage of the Virgin’.

Dulwich has presented the religious pictures in an imaginative way. Although it has always prided itself on its natural lighting and at one time had nothing else, now one end of the exhibition space has been partitioned off to suggest the muted interior of a church. There are grey walls and round-topped archways to set off the paintings in their ornate gilded frames.

Among the more secular pictures is a portrait of Murillo’s friend and patron, Don Justino de Neve. A self-portrait features a frame with the artist’s hand resting on this inner painted frame, giving the portrait a nice trompe-l’oeil touch.

But about all those bare feet: among the brightly coloured pictures of the Virgin and saints, there are two fine pictures of peasant life. Three Boys shows a group with an implied story: a black boy, apparently a servant on an errand with an earthenware jug, is speaking to a pair of urchins, presumably about a pie one of them is holding. Is he asking for a bite of it? Is he asking for the boy to give him back his pie? The other urchin seems about to pick the servant’s pocket. What is going on here? It is one of those paintings that invite the viewer to use some imagination in filling in the blanks.

The other scene of peasant life is The Invitation to a Game of Argolla, in which a grinning boy sitting on the ground (grubby feet in evidence) looks up at a standing boy, whose mouth is full of bread he has just bitten off from a small loaf in his left hand. The sitting boy has some bats and balls on the ground and a sort of awl in his hand. The standing boy is also carrying an earthenware jug and may have been sent to fill it with something. A small dog stands in the shadows between them looking up at him – or at that loaf of bread.

The dog isn’t the only thing in the shadows. In these scenes of contemporary Spanish life, the colours are of decidedly muddy hue with indistinct landscape or architecture in the background. ‘Spanish brown’ takes on real meaning with Murillo. His scenes of the simple life are done in muted shades with striking highlights, but the religious scenes have a palate strong in blues and reds with a pale yellow-orange for background or sky. Most of the light does not come from outside but rather radiates from the central figure of the Christ Child or the Virgin.

Murillo is a giant figure of 17th-century European art and of 18th- and 19th-century taste, but by the early 20th century he was thought too saccharine and sentimental. Now Murillo has been re-evaluated and re-appreciated for his skill, his portraiture, and his depiction of both real life and conventional religious themes. An image that remains with me after seeing both exhibitions is the sly grin of the boy inviting another kid to join him in a game of argullo. They are wearing tattered 17th-century peasant gear, but the grin is as modern as you could wish.

Murillo at the Wallace Collection: Painting of the Spanish Golden Age by Lucy Davis is published by the Wallace Collection. 25 col illus,  £4.50.

Murillo: At the Dulwich Picture Gallery by Xavier Bray is published by Philip Wilson Publishers. 49 col illus, £11.99.