Adoration of the Shepherds

In the 1660s Seville was still recovering from the plague of 1649, which had killed tens of thousands of its people. That is when the Capuchin friars, a strict begging order, asked Murillo to fill their church with canvases, and this Nativity hung in a side chapel on the right of the nave. Look at who arrives at the manger. A boy holding out a hen, a young woman with a basket of eggs, a shepherd with a lamb and an old man, each a different age of life, dressed like the working poor of Seville's own streets. Above them, small angels tumble through a break in the clouds. In 1810, with Napoleon's army about to take the city, the friars shipped the whole series to Gibraltar for safety. After the monasteries were closed in 1835, the paintings passed to the city's new museum, which is itself housed in a former convent.