Jacob's Dream

This was never meant for a church. In the 1660s the Marqués de Villamanrique wanted large canvases for his Seville palace, and Murillo gave him the story of Jacob across four huge pictures. Here Jacob lies asleep on the bare ground, his head resting on a stone, while angels climb a shaft of light toward a gap in the evening clouds, the dream from Genesis of a ladder set up to heaven. What surprises people who know Murillo for his soft Madonnas and Seville street children is how much of this canvas is landscape. He built that wide, glowing countryside from Flemish prints, a kind of painting he rarely made. The picture reached Saint Petersburg in 1811, bought in Paris for the Hermitage, where it still hangs beside its companion, Isaac Blessing Jacob.