Four Figures on a Step

Seville in the 1650s was a city recovering from catastrophe. The plague of 1649 had killed something close to half its people, and the once-booming port that handled Spain's American trade was thinning out. Murillo, who lost family young and would bury most of his own children, spent these years painting the ordinary people still on its streets, beggar boys, flower girls, old women. These four caught on a stone step have never been pinned down. Scholars have called the older woman in spectacles a procuress, or read her as a mother checking a child's hair for lice, a common image of care. The young woman lifts her shawl and meets your eye with something between a smile and a wink, and nobody agrees on what she is offering.