Francisco de Zurbarán

In January 1626 the Dominican monastery of San Pablo el Real in Seville contracted the young Francisco de Zurbarán for 21 paintings in eight months, 14 of them scenes from the life of Saint Dominic. He delivered on time, and the commission made his name. Within three years the city council of Seville formally invited him to move there permanently because his paintings, they said, were raising the city's reputation.

For the next two decades Zurbarán painted almost exclusively for monasteries and religious orders across Spain and its American colonies, developing a style built on stark light against near-black backgrounds and an unusual gift for rendering white cloth, the coarse wool habits of Carthusians and Franciscans painted with a sculptor's attention to folds and weight.

His market collapsed after 1640, when Seville's taste shifted toward the softer, more sentimental religious painting of the younger Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. Zurbarán moved to Madrid in 1658 looking for royal work and died there in 1664, largely overtaken by the painter he had once outshone.