Look especially at the Carthusian pictures in the Museum, “San Hugo visiting the Monks in their Refectory,” the “Virgen de las Cuevas,” and “St Bruno conversing with Pope Urban II.” They are typical of Zurbarán’s special gift. In the first of these three pictures, which is the best, the monks clad in the soft white robes of their order are seated around a table at their mid-day meal. The aged Hugo stands in the foreground, attended by a boy-page; he has come to reprove them for dining upon flesh-meat. His purple vestments give a note of colour in contrast with the white frocks of the brothers. But, as is customary with Zurbarán, colour counts for very little, and atmosphere for less, in this picture in which all care is given to formal outline and exact expression. Once only in the “Apotheosis of St Thomas Aquinas,” also in the Museo, does he give us some of that warm colour he should have learnt from Roelas, whose pupil he is said to have been. This is one reason why his figures, so true to the facts of life, do not live. But no one has painted ecclesiastics and monks quite as Zurbarán has done. His sincerity is annoying almost; for he tells us nothing that we could not have seen for ourselves; we are no nearer than a photograph would bring us to the character of these men. Zurbarán was hardly consciously an artist; and with all his sincerity, his vision was ordinary. He was a recorder and not an interpreter of life, and in gaining reality he has just missed truth.
On coming to the work of Murillo it is quite another phase of the religious sentiment of Spain that we see developed: we gain an over-statement of sweetness, not an over-statement of facts. The spirit in which he painted was happier, more trustful, more personal than was that of Zurbarán; he is more Andalusian and less Spanish, and certainly better equipped as a painter.
Murillo forms part of your life while you are in Seville, he is more or less around you everywhere; and though to some of us, perhaps not unjustly, he is a painter we have tried in vain to love, he does express in a special way the very aspect of the southern city he himself loved with such single devotion. This is why we like him so much better in Seville than we are able to do anywhere else. His pictures repeat the full life of Andalusia--its religious emotion, its splendour, its poverty, its stark contrasts, its rich sense of life; and his colours are the same colours that we see in the landscape, warm and deep, the soft, hot light of southern Spain. You don’t visit the Museum, La Caridad, the Cathedral, and the churches to see his pictures as a change of amusement from the streets; you go because they renew the same atmosphere, and offer a reproduction of so much that surrounds you.