Follower of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

The Prado's author line for its landscape of a wide lake among rocky outcrops reads Discípulo de Murillo, a pupil of Murillo. In Munich, the Alte Pinakothek files its Sleeping Christ Child with Angels under Nachfolger, a follower. Two museums in two languages have made the same decision. Both pictures were painted in the manner of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, the Seville master of soft-lit Virgins and ragged street children who died in 1682, by a hand that is not his and carries no name.

Follower of sits in the middle of the three formulas a catalogue uses to hold a master at a distance. It claims less than attributed to, which says the museum thinks the master himself probably painted the work. It says more than copy after, which points at one identified composition being repeated by somebody else. Neither of these two pictures repeats a known Murillo. The Prado's is titled simply Paisaje, landscape, and an 1857 royal inventory describes it as a great lake with rocky outcrops and a few buildings on them.