Knabe mit Hund

In 1649 the plague swept through Seville and killed close to half the city. Murillo lived through it, and the streets he knew afterwards were full of orphaned and begging children. He is remembered mostly for tender Madonnas and saints, yet he painted these ragged street kids with the same care. Here a boy in torn clothes grins over his shoulder at a small dog begging up at him. Murillo made him in the mid-1650s, in a city still thinned by the epidemic, and gave the picture a companion, a girl with fruit and flowers, now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.