No one has ever painted ecstasy with quite the facility of Murillo. And in the Museum, where the Capuchin Series and other famous pictures are gathered, you can learn all that is essential to his art; his happy Saints swim before you in mists of luscious colour; cherubs flutter around as they minister to beggars clad in rags carefully draped; Virgins, garbed in the conventional blue and white, their feet resting upon the crescent moon, vanish into luminous vapour, their robes rustle in the air, and their sun-lighted faces repeat the very complexion of Seville. Murillo had neither the power nor the desire to idealise his models. His Saints--St Francis of Assisi, St Felix of Cantalicio, St Anthony, St Thomas of Villanueva--and how many more? are men such as may be seen to-day in the streets of Seville; all are alike, the name alone differs. His Madonnas are peasants whose emotions are purely human. More perhaps than any painter Murillo’s work is personal--he translated the divine life and made it his own common human life--the fault is that his personality is not interesting. And seeing these pictures, and, even more, his other work--pictures hanging still in the churches for which they were painted, where they seem to share in the pervading religious emotion and to take their part in the life of the building--the “Vision of St Anthony of Padua” in the Baptistery of the Cathedral, for instance, or the great pictures of La Caridad; you will understand how Murillo came to be idolised in Spain; how his pictures held, for a time, the admiration of Europe; and how to-day he has ceased to interest a world that has grown older and seeks, above all, the truth.
Murillo was impelled by a desire for realism. There is much of the spirit and manner of Zurbarán in his early pictures: “San Leandro and San Buenaventura,” two early “Virgins and the Child,” and the “Adoration of the Shepherds,” all in the Museum, are examples. The same careful characterisation meets us in the much later “Last Supper” of Santa Maria la Blanca, his most truthful Scriptural scene. Then his portraits, such as those of SS. Leandro and Isidore in the Sacristia Mayor of the Cathedral, or that of St Dorothy in the Sacristia de los Cálices, are serious studies after nature. Once or twice in his landscapes we find a sincerity that surprises us. But a painter must be judged by the main output of his art. And the truth is that, with a natural gift that certainly was great, added to unusual facility, Murillo’s personality was commonplace. His self-assurance amazes us. His emotion, neither profound nor simple, but always perfectly satisfied, perfectly happy, exactly fitted him to give voice to the common sentiments of his age. He did create a sort of life, but his compositions are the work of his hand rather than of his soul. All his Saints, his Madonnas--pose unthinkingly in the subtly interwoven light he knew so well how to paint, living only in the moment which their conventionalised attitudes perpetuate. You do not realise them as personalities greeting you from the canvas like the intense, painful faces of El Greco, or the wonderful creations of Velazquez; if you remember them at all it is part of a pleasing picture. This is the reason why these religious idylls have lost so much of their meaning; their over-statement of sweetness cloys. Murillo gives us one aspect of Andalusia; it was left for El Greco, Ribera, Velazquez, and Goya to interpret Spain to the world.