São João Batista

Zurbarán painted this around 1638 for the high altar of the Carthusian monastery at Jerez de la Frontera, one of about a dozen canvases set into a huge structure of gilt wood, stucco and sculpture. The Baptist hung beside the tabernacle, with a Saint Lawrence on the other side, and Zurbarán gave him the build of a young man who really had lived outdoors, shown half-length with the lamb under his hand. The altarpiece came apart in the upheavals of the early 19th century. This canvas went into a store in Madrid in 1810, then to the Academy of Fine Arts there, then back to the charterhouse, and reached the museum in Cádiz in the mid 1830s once the monasteries were dissolved. Four more canvases from the same altarpiece were bought in Paris in 1901 by a French general and handed straight to the museum in Grenoble, where they still are.