Saint Anthony of Padua with the Child

Murillo painted this around 1668 for the Capuchin friary on the edge of Seville, one of a large group of canvases he made for the friars' church. Saint Anthony kneels on rocky ground and reaches up as the Christ Child comes down to him on a shaft of light, seated on an open book. Murillo builds the whole encounter out of warm golden tone and the soft, pearly skin of the child, painted with the loose, vaporous brushwork of his later years. The picture left the friary in the 19th century, when the Spanish state dissolved the religious houses and seized what they held. That is how it reached the city's Museo de Bellas Artes, together with much of the rest of the Capuchin commission, where it hangs today.