Saint Cyril of Constantinople

In February 1810 French troops entered Seville, and during the occupation they gathered 999 paintings out of the city's churches into the royal palace of the Alcázar. This narrow canvas was one of them. It came from an altarpiece Zurbarán had painted for the Carmelite college of San Alberto, and it left the Alcázar with Marshal Soult, the French commander in the south. By 1836 Soult had sold it to the Duke of Sutherland, along with its companion panel of the Carmelite Peter Thomas, and the two stayed together at Dunrobin Castle in Scotland until 1913, when Christie's in London sold them as a single lot. The saint himself owes a great deal to legend. The earliest accounts call Cyril only a Greek priest and hermit on Mount Carmel. Later Carmelite writers made him the head of their order and a prophet, and in 1399 he was given a feast day. The pair kept company all the way to Boston, where Zoe Oliver Sherman, a local collector, gave Cyril to the museum in 1922 and Peter Thomas a year later.