Saint Francis

In the spring of 1823 a French army crossed into Spain to restore King Ferdinand the Seventh to absolute power, and Britain's ambassador in Madrid at the time was William à Court. That same year he acquired this Saint Francis in Madrid and took it home to Heytesbury House in Wiltshire, where his descendants kept it for a hundred years. The canvas is just over two metres tall, a single standing figure of the saint in his habit, and the Boston museum dates it to the early 1640s. Zurbarán keeps the colour restrained and the composition almost bare, and lights the figure hard from one side. In April 1926, after the death of Margaret, Lady Heytesbury, it was sold at a sale held at the house as lot 1358, for 21 pounds. It surfaced again in the 1930s with dealers, and in 1938 the Museum of Fine Arts bought it from a firm in Lucerne.