The Young Christ as the Good Shepherd

In May 1844 the collection of Jeremiah Harman, a London banker who had been Governor of the Bank of England, was sold at Christie's. Among the pictures was a Good Shepherd by Murillo, bought by a man named Stewart, and the Museum of Fine Arts thinks this canvas is very probably that picture. It passed to Stewart's son, Colonel William Stewart, and after that the trail goes faint.

When it surfaced again in New York in the 1950s, with the dealer Rudolf Heinemann and his wife Lore, grander names had attached themselves to it. Letters written while the museum was acquiring it in December 1958 said it had belonged to the royal collections of France, to Louis-Philippe and to a Colonel Drax. The museum has not been able to confirm any of this. The most it allows is that the Duke of Orléans sold a large group of paintings in 1791 that later reached Harman, and whether this one was among them is unknown.

The composition, the young Christ as a shepherd, is one Murillo painted himself more than once, and the museum gives this version to his workshop in Seville. On the back, a label from the London packers Chenue pairs Heinemann's name with that of Bottenwieser, a Berlin dealer, and the stretcher carries French and Swiss customs stamps.