Saint Augustine in Prayer

In 1833, the last year of his reign, Ferdinand VII bought a group of paintings from the collection of the Marqués de Alcántara in Madrid, and this Augustine came in with them. The royal museum on the Paseo del Prado had opened only fourteen years earlier with pictures taken from the palaces, so purchases like this one were how its holdings grew. The Prado dates the canvas no more precisely than the first half of the 17th century. Augustine is shown at prayer with a book and a pen, the tools of the man who wrote the Confessions and the City of God. The picture stands over two metres tall and is at present kept in store rather than on show.