The Prodigal Son taking leave of his Home

This is one of four small canvases in the Prado that repeat scenes from a series of six Murillo painted on the parable of the prodigal son. The six large ones have been in Dublin since 1987, when Sir Alfred and Lady Beit gave them to the National Gallery of Ireland. This one is 27 by 34 centimetres and very loosely handled, and for a long time nobody could say what such pictures were for. An X-ray answered part of it. The Dublin version of this same scene has a large ruined building in the background that Murillo painted out, and the X-ray of the small canvas shows no trace of it, so by the time he came to this one he had already given the building up. That rules out the idea that these were trial runs or samples shown to a client for approval, and leaves the ricordo, a small record kept of work he thought worth remembering. Two scenes of the six are missing from the Prado group, the expulsion from the brothel and the return home, and it is not known whether they were lost or never painted.