Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo grew up fast in Seville. Both his parents died within months of each other in 1627 and 1628, leaving him an orphan at ten, and by twelve he was apprenticed to the local painter Juan del Castillo. That early exposure to poverty stayed with him: alongside the pious images that made his name, he painted a long series of street children, among them The Young Beggar in the Louvre, showing flower sellers, urchins, and boys eating melon and grapes with a warmth rare in an era that mostly ignored them.

His larger reputation, though, rested on the Virgin and Child and above all the Immaculate Conception, a subject he returned to dozens of times over four decades and rendered with a soft, glowing technique that Seville's churches and confraternities kept commissioning. In 1660 he co-founded the city's Academia de Bellas Artes, sharing its direction with the architect Francisco Herrera the Younger, giving Seville's painters a formal school independent of the old guild system.

Murillo worked into his sixties without slowing down. In 1682, while up on scaffolding painting a fresco for the Capuchin church in Cádiz, he fell and was badly injured; he died back in Seville a few months later, on 3 April 1682.