An Urchin mocking an Old Woman eating Migas

Murillo is remembered for soft-eyed Madonnas, so a jeering street boy comes as a surprise. Here a ragged urchin points and laughs at an old woman hunched over her bowl of migas, a cheap dish of fried breadcrumbs that the poor of Seville ate to get by. She guards it warily, half turned away from him. Murillo painted this around 1662, in a Seville still thinned by the plague of 1649, which had killed a large part of the city and left its streets full of exactly these children. Pictures like this found few buyers in Spain. Northern European merchants collected them, which is how this one reached Dyrham Park in England, bought by the official William Blathwayt. A second version hangs beside it there, an 18th-century copy once hopefully credited to Gainsborough.