Madonna and Child

This picture carries a family name. It is known as the Santiago Madonna, after the marqueses de Santiago in Madrid, who owned several outstanding Murillos and kept this one until 1808. In the years around that date a great many Spanish collections came apart, and the canvas eventually reached New York, bought by the Metropolitan in 1943. The museum dates it to about 1670 to 1672, the last decade of Murillo's life, and gives it to him without qualification, which counts for something with a painter whose manner was copied as widely as his was. It is a large canvas, over a metre and a half tall. The Virgin is nursing, and the child has broken off and turned to look out at whoever is standing there.