The Young Beggar

Seville in the mid-1600s was a city of plague and hunger, its streets full of abandoned children, and Murillo, who lost both parents young, painted them without sentiment. A boy sits alone in a bare corner, his clothes torn, picking lice from his own shirt where sunlight falls through a window on the left. Around him lie the props of a hard day: a clay jug, a few shrimp, apples spilled from a basket. It was among the first times a Spanish painter made a single ragged street child the whole subject of a serious canvas, in the manner of Caravaggio's raking light. Louis XVI later kept it in the French royal collection, an image of Sevillian poverty hanging among the possessions of a king.