Bartolomé Esteban Murillo Biography - Infos for Sellers and Buyers

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

Sevilla 1618 - Sevilla 1682

The Spanish baroque painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo was born on January 16, 1618 in Seville. Murillo spent his childhood in Fuente de Cantos, where he showed a talent for painting at an early age. Soon Bartolemé Esteban Murillo was sent to the Spanish painter Pedro Diaz de Villanueva in Seville as an apprentice.
Compared to Diego Velázquez, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo is regarded as a more folklorist painter of Spanish baroque. He himself regarded religious pictures of madonnas and saints as the most important part of is oeuvre. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo's similarly important worldly pictures mainly reflect life in his home town of Seville, typical scenes include street urchins and children begging.
Murillo was also a master of still life, his main pieces show a masterful separation of the immanent and transcendental levels, which nevertheless remain closely linked. The last picture Murillo painted was probably the "Virgin and Child with St. John the Baptist", dated 1662.
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo rendered outstanding services to art, but by that point in time his fame had faded. Murillo had a significant influence on El Greco and Velázquez even though his style remained unsurpassed. At an old age, the artist Bartolomé Esteban Murillo fell from a ladder while he was working and died from the consequences of the accident on April 3, 1682 in Seville.