San Francisco de Paula

When Fernando VII's officials went through the royal palaces after the war with Napoleon, this canvas was at Aranjuez, in the seventh room of the prince's quarters. The entry against it, number 187, runs to a single line: San Francisco de Paula kneeling, Murillo. The museum's catalogue of 1857 fills that in a little, describing the saint leaning on a staff, kneeling on a stone, absorbed in thought. He was a Calabrian hermit who founded the Order of Minims and died in France in 1507, and Seville knew him well, because the Minims kept a large house across the river in Triana. Beyond the century the Prado will not go, dating the painting only to the 17th. Its catalogue number has moved twice, from 891 in the 1870s to 991 in 1910, and 991 is what it still answers to.