Die Befreiung des heiligen Petrus

Murillo painted this in the 1660s for the church of a charitable brotherhood in Seville, the Hermandad de la Caridad, which ran a hospital for the poor and the dying. The story is from the Acts of the Apostles: an angel wakes Peter in his cell, his chains fall away, and the guard sleeps on, unaware. More than a century later, during Napoleon's occupation of Spain, the French marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult gathered up Spanish paintings on a large scale, and this one left Seville with him. It later surfaced in Paris, and when his collection was sold in 1852 the Russian imperial court bought it for the Hermitage, where it hangs today.