St. John the Baptist with the Scribes and Pharisees

This canvas stands over two and a half metres tall because it was made to hang high in a dining hall. Around 1655 Murillo painted four large pictures of the life of John the Baptist, together with one of St Augustine washing Christ's feet, for the refectory of the Augustinian convent of San Leandro in Seville, the city where he was born and where he spent nearly his whole working life. The nuns ate under them for a century and a half. In 1810, with the French army holding Seville and religious houses being emptied, this one left the convent for an English merchant living in the city; the remaining pictures were sold to a Seville collector two years later and scattered from there. Its companion piece, Ecce Agnus Dei, is now in Chicago. John stands on the right in camel hair with his cross staff, facing three better-dressed men who have come out to question him.