All Objects

In this self-portrait, Murillo appears older, forlorn and weary. The painter was, at this point, a widower in his fifties with four children. The canvas is dedicated, in a Latin inscription, to his sons: “Bartolomé Murillo portraying himself to fulfill the wishes and prayers of his children.” To the left of the stone frame is a sheet of paper with a red chalk drawing, a wooden ruler, a compass, and a red chalkholder. On the opposite side are the painter’s brushes and palette. Surrounded by the tools of his trade, Murillo is presented as the important Sevillian artist that he was. The painter’s right hand protrudes from the fictive stone frame in a particularly original way. This trompe l’oeil motif was employed again by Murillo and by his followers.

This charming portrait of an unknown young man first appeared on the market in 2009, as an anonymous Spanish work. By comparison with Murillo’s portrait of Juan Arias de Saavedra and the Frick self-portrait, it can be attributed to the painter and dated to the first half of the 1650s. It is tempting to identify the sitter as one of the painter’s sons, but he is more likely an aristocrat from Seville. The painting was cut down on all sides at an unknown date.

A merchant from Antwerp who moved to Seville in the late 1660s, Nicolás Omazur (ca. 1630–1698) owned more than two hundred paintings, including thirty-one by Murillo, who was a close friend. This painting has a pendant portrait of Omazur’s wife, Elizabeth Maelcamp (now in a private collection). The top part of a fictive stone cartouche is barely visible at the bottom of the canvas. Descriptions in seventeenth-century inventories establish that the painting has been substantially cut down. Originally, it had a complex fictive frame with the painting’s date and a Latin inscription that referred to the skull in the portrait and invited the viewer to gaze at both Omazur and the face of Death, exhorting posterity to see the skull as a future image of themselves.

Deeply interested in the boundaries between art and reality, Murillo used trompe l’oeil solutions in his self-portraits to play with the pictorial space of his compositions. This exceptionally realistic painting, one of Murillo’s most famous and mysterious works, is devised as the space of a window. Emerging from the darkness are two young girls who may be prostitutes. The painting may refer to a Spanish proverb: "la mujer ventanera, uva de la calle" (a woman at the window, a grape of the street).

Long believed to be a copy after a lost Murillo (and described as such in the exhibition catalogue), this portrait has very recently been restored and discovered to be the original. A celebrated aristocrat in Seville, Diego Ortiz de Zúñiga (1633–1680) was also a historian who charted the history of the city from the Middle Ages to 1671 in his Annales eclesiásticos y seculares de la ciudad de Sevilla. His coat of arms appears at the top of the frame and the cross of the Order of Santiago on his left shoulder. The portrait is listed among Ortiz de Zúñiga’s possessions at the time of his death, in 1680. The elaborate stone frame with putti is similar to the one in the portrait of Juan Arias de Saavedra.

This drawing is closely related to the 1790 engraving after Murillo’s self-portrait by Manuel Alegre. Executed in graphite and brown ink, it is the same size as the print and is likely a proof made by Alegre to see how the image and text worked together before he printed the full image with the additional texts.

Northern prints such as this provided the visual model for many of Murillo’s portraits and their framing devices. The portrait of the Count-Duke of Olivares, King Philip IV’s minister and one of the most powerful men in Spain, is based on an image by Velázquez, while the framing elements were designed by Rubens. Palm branches, torches, and trumpets herald the sitter’s fame. The spear, shield, and owl of Minerva (on the left) praise his wisdom, while the club and lion skin of Hercules (on the right), celebrate his strength. The unfinished state of this specific example of the engraving is particularly rare.

As the discipline of art history became better codified in the nineteenth century, books on Spanish art, and on Murillo in particular, began to be published. The four volumes in the exhibition demonstrate how Murillo’s self-portrait at the Frick had become the standard image of the painter in the art historical literature of the period. Before photography became an indispensable tool for art history, these engravings faithfully reproduced the original painting, which at that time moved between different collections in Paris and London. In 1904, the canvas was purchased by Henry Clay Frick and reached New York.

Other volumes in the exhibition: 

Annals of the Artists of Spain (London, 1848)
Murillo (London, 1882)
Murillo: A Biography and Appreciation (London, 1907)