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Murillo spent his whole life in Seville, and by the time he painted this, around 1670, he was the city's leading painter. Seville had suffered badly earlier in the century, a plague in 1649 carried off a large share of its people, and the tender, homely religious pictures Murillo specialised in met a real hunger for warm, approachable devotion. Here the Holy Family is shown almost as an ordinary household, with the infant John the Baptist, the little cousin, brought in among them. Murillo softens everything, the edges, the light, the faces, in the gentle manner that would make him one of the most copied painters in Europe for the next two centuries. The children have the plump, natural look he drew from the street children he studied endlessly in Seville.