St. Justa and St. Rufina

In 1665 the Capuchin friars of Seville put Murillo to work on their new church, and over the next year or so he produced one of the largest commissions of his career. This canvas, 32 by 24 centimetres, is the oil sketch in which he settled one of those compositions. The two women are Justa and Rufina, potters in Seville, killed in the city under Roman rule around the year 287 after refusing to supply pottery for a pagan rite. They are holding up a model of the Giralda, the great bell tower of Seville, which the city believed the sisters had held steady through the earthquake of 1504. The pottery stacked at their feet does not match the finished altarpiece, which hangs in the Museo de Bellas Artes in Seville. Tokyo bought the sketch in 1969, after it had passed through a Spanish collection, the Stirling Maxwell family in Scotland and a dealer in New York.