Nostra Signora del Rosario

When Murillo painted this around 1650, his city of Seville had just been through catastrophe. The plague of 1649 swept through in a single summer and killed something close to half the people in it, and Murillo, still a young painter, lost family and neighbours to it. Out of those years came a stream of gentle, close-held Virgins like this one, Mary shown almost as an ordinary young mother cradling her child, a rosary looped through her hand. The rosary was the prayer people counted in times of fear, bead by bead. There is nothing grand or distant in her, and that warmth, soft skin and dark eyes turned toward you, helped make Murillo the favourite painter of Seville for the rest of the century. The picture now hangs in Castres in southern France, on long loan from the Louvre.