Murillo: Scenes of Childhood

Here, for the first time Murillo's pictures of childhood are collected together, demonstrating how the artist's own experiences as a member of the Brotherhood of Charity, which distributed bread to the starving of Seville, invested his paintings of street children with first-hand knowledge of their lives and genuine compassion for their plight. The Catholic Church promoted the notion that the rich needed the poor in order to be able to perform acts of charity for them and thus attain grace. The crop failures of the 1670s and the resultant famine made the middle and upper classes of the city more conscious than ever of its vast population of the dispossessed. Murillo's paintings often feature apparently well-nourished though grubby children relishing fruits and tarts: part of his artistic mission was to encourage acts of charity towards the poor, and the sympathy and affection that his paintings are intended to provoke in the viewer are often designed to assist this aim.