Saint Thomas de Villeneuve faisant l'aumône aux pauvres

Murillo painted this for the Capuchin friars of Seville around 1668, and of all his pictures this was the one he loved best. The early biographer Palomino records that the painter called it simply mi cuadro, my canvas, and prized its handling of light. The subject is a 16th-century archbishop, Thomas of Villanueva, known for giving almost everything he had to the poor, and Murillo surrounds him on the palace steps with real Seville faces: a mother, a lame beggar, a child. The city had barely recovered from the plague of 1649 that killed close to half its people, and beggars at the church door were an everyday sight. When the convent was later dissolved, the canvas passed to the city's Museo de Bellas Artes.