For the next 10 minutes, we're going to look together at Bartolomé Esteban Murillo's
'Self Portrait', one of the great treasures of the Spanish collection at the National Gallery,
and find out more about what it tells us about Murillo as a person, but also, more
subtly, what it tells us about Murillo's achievements and ambition as an artist.
When Murillo painted this portrait in around 1670, he was the preeminent painter in Seville,
the city in southern Spain which he had been born in in 1617, and which he left just once
in his life. He presents himself to us as an artist, with all the attributes of an artist.
On the one side, we have the implements of drawing. A red chalk in its holder, a compass, a rolled up
chalk drawing, and a straight edge. On the other side, we have the implements of the painter.
An orderly rectangular palette, daubed with paint, and brushes beneath. He also shows
himself to us as a prosperous man, a citizen of Seville. He wears an elegant slashed black tunic
through which we can just see his sleeves and a lace-white collar called a valona which rests
softly on his shoulders. But despite all the trappings of success, Murillo represents himself
in the 'Self Portrait' with an air of melancholy. His thin pencil moustache has started to turn grey,
his hairline to recede, and his skin to sag. This is a man who looks world weary. We're not only
able to tell this because of the facts of his biography, but because, about 20 years earlier,
when he was in his mid-30s, a young artist on the make, he painted a wonderful self-portrait now in
the collection of the Frick in New York. In this more youthful self-portrait, his mouth is slightly
open. There's a brash sort of braggadocious air to the artist in this image, and in fact, in the Frick
self portrait, he doesn't even present himself as an artist, but rather with no other attributes,
but simply a fashionable dress. He's a gentleman. What had happened in the intervening 20 years?
What was it that led to this tinge of melancholy in Murillo's expression? By the middle of the 17th
century, Seville was a city in decline. Murillo's native city had suffered an economic downturn
following the silting up of the Guadalquivir river, the river which led from the city out the Atlantic,
and through which Spanish fleets had traveled from the colonies in the Americas to Seville,
where they disembarked their wealth. As the river silted up the trade moved to Cadiz, a city on the
coast. This economic decline was only hastened in 1649 by the outbreak of a great plague that
carried away some 60 000 inhabitants of the city, just under half of the city's total population.
Murillo was not personally unaffected by this. His two eldest children died in 1649 and to add to
his tragedies in 1663 his wife Beatriz Cabrera passed away in childbirth. Murillo's own personal
religiosity may have contributed to his decision to make another self-portrait around 1670, but it
was also certainly at the behest of his children. The latin inscription the cartouche below reads,
'Bartolomé Murillo, painting himself to fulfil the wishes and prayers of his children'. His children, then,
asked for a representation of their father to stay in the family home, most likely, and Murillo,
despite being hobbled by the loss of a number of his children and of his dear wife, complied.
If these 20 years had brought great personal pain they also brought tremendous professional success.
During this period, Murillo became famed for his work as a painter of religious scenes, unlike
his contemporary Diego Velázquez, also born in Seville but essentially an artist of the court in Madrid.
Murillo painted scenes for religious institutions, such as the cathedral of Seville confraternities
and other religious associations. The National Gallery's collection includes a number of
religious works by Murillo, like 'Christ Healing the Sick at the Pool of Bethesda', painted for
the Hospital de la Caridad in Seville between 1667 and 1670, just three years before the self-portrait.
This work, and others like it, showcase Murillo's ability to bring biblical narratives to life, to endow them
with harmonious compositions, and to make them appealing for viewers who might not be literate.
The chalk drawing that Murillo depicts himself with seems to show two legs, if we look closely,
and even if it's not possible to tell here, they may represent the legs of a youthful figure like
the beggar boys and young saints like our infant Saint John the Baptist that Murillo was best known
for. The red chalk drawing that we see below the frame also alludes to another of Murillo's artistic
achievements in this period. In 1660 he was the co-founder of a drawing academy in Seville and
indeed some scholars have suggested that because the drawing appears on Murillo's right-hand side,
it suggests his allegiance to the art of drawing. And indeed, he was a prolific draftsman, even though
he was best known as a master of the brush. The inclusion of a ledge across the foreground of
a picture was a device that Murillo uses in his own self-portrait as well as in other kinds of images,
including the 'Young Peasant Boy Leaning on a Sill', also in the Gallery's collection.
In that work, as in his self-portrait, the ledge provides a dividing line between the real
and the represented. We look into the picture and the figure looks back out at us.
The young peasant boy leaning on a sill was also the first work by any Spanish artist
to enter the collection of the National Gallery, which it did in 1826 just two years after the
founding of the Gallery. This gives us a sense of the enduring popularity of Murillo,
especially in this country, where his work was known and celebrated from the early 18th century
until the closing decades of the 19th century. Murillo's self-portrait seems to
have come to England quite early, probably in the first decades of the 18th century.
Such was the interest in Murillo abroad outside Spain that in 1779 king Carlos III of Spain
issued a decree prohibiting the export of all kinds of paintings and antiquities, but the only
painter that he names by name is Murillo. Murillo's self-portrait remained in private collections
in this country throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. It appeared, however, on the art market
in London in 1850. When it was offered at auction records in the National Gallery archives show that
the Gallery was very interested in acquiring the work, but so too were many, many other people and
the cost became prohibitive. The picture eventually entered the collection of the Gallery in 1953. Even
though the painting had remained in private hands for much of its existence, this likeness of Murillo
was in fact quite well known, because in 1682 an engraving was made after the painting in Brussels.
for a time it was supposed the painting itself had been sent to Brussels from Spain to be engraved,
but it seems more likely that because of the value of the work, and its importance to Murillo's family,
a drawing was sent from Seville to Brussels, after which an engraving was made.
In the engraving, there are a number of notable differences from the portrait.
The latin inscription is changed to indicate that Murillo is a painter from Seville, and the
still life elements the implements of drawing and painting are removed, and of course the composition
is reversed in the print. Additionally, and by far the most notable alteration,
is the placement of the artist's hand. In our self-portrait, his hand sits on the fictive stone
frame breaking the boundary between us and between him, between the painted surface and the real.
In the engraving, the hand remains resolutely behind the frame, and there isn't the same kind
of representational trickery or a deceit. There is a riddle here to be solved for the viewer.
Is Murillo in our space, or in his own? With the hand on the frame, Murillo draws our attention
to the fictive stone frame in which he appears, and his use of highlighting on the hand and on
his face while the rest of his body recedes into illusionistic shadow draws our attention to the
setting in which he is portrayed. It also draws our attention to the frame actually around the picture.
This wonderful 17th century Spanish Baroque frame which retains its original gilding and much of its
original paint was acquired and adapted for the picture by the gallery in 2012. It's remarkable
not only for its state of preservation, but for the way that it pushes the picture out toward us.
The painting projects toward us just as the brushes and the rule do below, and to add to
this conceit, a Spanish scholar recently proposed that Murillo blended a verbal with a visual pun. He
was writing about the stone frame that encircles Murillo's likeness in the Frick self-portrait,
but the same kind of argument however might well also apply to our self-portrait. An artist painting
a self-portrait would look at themselves in a mirror representing themselves as they painted.
In Spanish the word for mirror is espejo. It has another meaning however. Espejo can also mean
an oval or round architectural frame, often adorned with ornament like this one. If this interpretation
holds true, Murillo has represented himself in an espejo after having painted himself in
an espejo. This punning this witticism only adds to the Baroque conceit of this fantastic
portrait which along with Diego Velázquez's self-portrait in 'Las Meninas' is among the
most sophisticated and influential portraits of the 17th century in Spain. If you'd like to learn
more about art history, please click here or here, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.