Immaculate Virgins and Dirty Footed Beggars

“Dulwich Picture Gallery becomes a Seville church”.   At least that’s how the latest exhibition there has been advertised.   Sadly it isn’t quite true.  With the best will in the world the galleries which have been adapted for the purpose are neither high nor long enough to really mimic Santa Maria de la Neve, lack the splendid Baroque stucco work which covers the ceiling there and don’t have the complex architectural structures which betray the church’s past lives as a mosque, then a synagogue.  Nor do they have the scent of incense and votive candles hanging in the air.

I suppose it’s a pardonable exaggeration to publicise an intriguing small scale show which focuses on the relationship between the great Seville painter Murillo and the clergyman Justino de Neve.   Murillo’s portrait of Neve is in the exhibition (see above).   The cathedral canon is shown, richly but soberly dressed as befits his station, looking up from the prayer book in his hand as if to receive an unexpected (but not unwelcome), visitor.  His pug looks adoringly up at him; she’s clearly a much loved companion (rather spoiled, one suspects- she looks rather overweight) as well as a symbol of fidelity.   The richly decorated German clock on the table serves to remind him (and us as viewers) of the inexorable passage of time and certainly of death.   The overall impression is of decorum and low-key benevolence; we are in the presence of an important man but not an intimidating one.

This no doubt reflects how the slightly older Murillo regarded Neve, who appears to have been a friend and spiritual advisor to the artist as well as a neighbour and significant patron.  Neve was indeed an important man.   Descended on his father’s side from a wealthy Flemish merchant who had settled in Seville (I assume the original family name must have been something like “Schnee”), he came from a very well to do and well connected family whose members held posts of power and influence in the city’s government as well as the church.   Justino himself was for many years a canon of Seville cathedral, one of the richest ecclesiastical corporations in 17^th century Spain.   He held a number of positions within the cathedral chapter over the years, including a stint as the man responsible for the upkeep of the fabric and decorations.  He was also a leading member of a range of devotional groups and confraternities, where his path would have crossed that of Murillo.   Neve appears to have been assiduous in performing his priestly duties as well as a hard working and competent administrator.  He was not always as benevolent as he appears in Murillo’s portrait- he was a strict taskmaster on colleagues who didn’t fulfil their functions within the chapter properly and came down very hard indeed on those involved in producing a printed satire on the chapter and its members (sadly this was not included in the show or even in the catalogue- though it’s quite possible that no examples survived Neve’s attentions).   All in all he seems to have tried to live up to the ideals set out for Counter-Reformation clergy.

The exhibition deals both with Murillo’s presence in Neve’s personal art collection (which was rather larger than the average holdings of his cathedral colleagues and contained substantially more Murillos than that of any other private collector in the city) and the art he produced for Neve’s foundations. There doesn’t seem to be any correspondence between Neve and Murillo which would give a sense of how exactly they interacted or provide insights on how they cooperated on Neve’s major commissions.   It’s pretty clear that Murillo was not a servile forelock-tugger.   His self portrait shows a man with a very strong sense of his own worth as a major artist (contemporaries universally regarded him as Seville’s leading artist by the 1650’s and was never short of work).   He may have been a bit of a parvenu by comparison with Neve’s old money but they appear to have shared devotional convictions (in particular the fervent strain of Marian piety common in 17^th century Seville which found its expression in an almost obsessive concern to celebrate the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary).   One of Murillo’s sons became a member of the Seville cathedral chapter, a sign that he was regarded as a fully fledged member of the city elite.

Seville in the second half of the 17^th century was a city with great extremes of wealth and poverty in close juxtaposition- as were most early modern cities, but Seville was a particularly extreme case.   The city (in theory anyway) held a monopoly on trade between Spain and its American colonies; as a result the annual treasure fleets shipping the gold and (increasingly) silver of Mexico and Bolivia to bolster the Spanish state’s budget docked there and all vessels aiming to trade in the New World left from its port.  Substantial trade with other parts of Europe- particularly the Netherlands- grew up on the back of this transatlantic activity.   Huge amounts of money flowed through the city, drawing in a substantial population from its rural hinterland and beyond.   Some did very well, others slid into extreme poverty and destitution.    The city streets were thronged with beggars and day labourers, lackeys in livery (some of them African slaves) and impoverished clergy eking out a living on fees for saying masses.  Things were hardly improved by regular visitations of the plague (there was a major epidemic in 1649) and repeated warfare which disrupted trade and jacked taxes on the non-noble, non-clergy masses to sky high levels.

  

As a rich churchman, Neve was expected to devote a healthy chunk of his income to Good Works of one kind or another.  As a result, he had to fund the restoration of Santa Maria de la Neve out of his own pocket (for obvious reasons linked to his name he had a particular devotion to this particular piece of Marian piety, a Roman legend linked to the foundation of the great Roman basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore).    His biggest foundation, however, was a retirement home cum hospital for aged and infirm clergy known as the “Venerabiles Sacerdotes”.   Concern for poverty and illness among the clergy seems to have been a particular concern for Neve- on one occasion it is said he took personal charge of a priest suffering from dementia.   He put a great deal of money into the home, though he didn’t live to see it completed; Murillo’s portrait was left to the institution to ensure that he remained spiritually present after his death, benefitting from the prayers of the residents to shorten his time in Purgatory (when we see it now in the National Gallery in London it’s easy to forget that we are really supposed to offer up a prayer for Neve).

What about the art that Murillo created for Neve?   I have to confess that Murillo isn’t my favourite 17^th century Spanish artist- I much prefer Velasquez, precisely because his work isn’t so drenched in a style of Counter-Reformation piety which eventually becomes a bit alienating if you don’t share the faith which underpins it.   Ultimately there is a limit to the number of representations of the Immaculate Conception one can look at without a sense of boredom and déjà vu, however skilfully they are done (I’m not technically minded enough in my appreciation of art to really appreciate the slight differences in brushwork and composition which clearly fascinate the real experts).    Murillo developed a model which clearly worked very well for his patrons (not just Neve) but I’m afraid to my eye one graceful female in blue and white blasting off in a great blaze of light amid a horde of putti come to look very much like another. 

Obviously he didn’t just do Immaculate Conceptions.   The decorations of Santa Maria de la Neve included illustrations of the underlying legend squeezed into rather awkward shaped lunettes- there’s a rather charming detail in the picture which depicts the shared dream of the Roman Patrician and his wife with her dog curled up asleep on the floor beside them (dreaming a doggy version of the angelic vision perhaps?). 

 The real pleasures for me, however, come in those paintings which show the interaction of earthly and heavenly powers like the one below (from the Venerabiles Sacerdotes), in which very individual humans- almost certainly real people- share the space with angels and heavenly beings.   There’s a wonderful concreteness about this and a more immediately appealing sense of what baroque styles of piety were trying to achieve in their attempt to weaken and even breach the wall between this world and higher powers.   The bread which the Christ Child offers isn’t an abstract depiction of the sacraments but a basket full of loaves fresh from the bakery down the road which will taste delicious when broken and shared.

Neve’s private collection was naturally also long on sacred pieces.   One might even query how far it is appropriate to talk of a purely “private” collection as it is clear that Neve and his colleagues were expected to put their own paintings in public display from time to time, usually in the context of decorating temporary open air altars set up for major public festivities linked to great events (the canonisation of the Castilian King Ferdinando III, who had taken Seville from the Moors in the 13th century, for instance).   These could be enormous and served as a kind of temporary public art gallery as well as a place of ritual importance.   One hopes it didn’t rain……

Not everything by Murillo that Neve owned lent itself to this kind of display.  Some items were simply too small- several miniatures, including ones painted on the unusual surface of Mexican green obsidian.   Others didn’t quite fit into the devotional context.  One such piece is the gorgeous portrait below, now a permanent Dulwich resident.   There’s a lot of rather inconclusive debate over what (or who) exactly is represented here.  The conventional view is that this is the “Spring” listed in Neve’s collection (and that the male portrait below it is the corresponding “Summer”).   There are problems with both identifications. They clearly weren’t painted as a pair as they date from different periods of Murillo’s life.   Neither look quite right- the flowers and fruits associated with both seem out of synch with the seasons they’re supposed to represent, for instance.  On the other hand it’s hard to find other paintings in the Neve catalogue which they could be (the provenance seems reasonably assured- or so the exhibition catalogues imply).   Nor is it certain who the models are.   There is a theory that the girl is Murillo’s daughter, who eventually entered a convent alongside some of Neve’s female relatives.  The roses the girl bears in her head dress would then be a reference to St Rose of Lima, to whom Murillo’s daughter had a special devotion.   It’s a very ingenious idea- maybe too clever.   Perhaps one should just share the obvious pleasure which the subject took in getting dressed up and having her portrait painted.

“Catalogues” isn’t a typo (shaky though my keyboard skills can be).   There are actually two Murillo-focused exhibitions in Dulwich.  The first, based on his links with Neve, started out in Spain and came to London because of Dulwich’s ownership of key paintings with Neve links.   The second looks at the gallery’s own links with Murillo’s works and takes us into a slightly different world from the high baroque Catholicism of Neve’s Seville.  

While Murillo is well respected as an artist these days, I don’t suppose there are many commentators who would place him in the all-time Top Ten figures in European art.   Things looked very different in the late 18^th century.   Murillo’s work was hugely admired by connoisseurs across Europe and commanded very high prices.  Indeed the demand for Murillos was so high that Seville churches were in danger of being stripped of their paintings to meet it- in 1779 the Spanish authorities imposed a royal embargo on exports of his works.  This didn’t do them any good when the French invaded during the Napoleonic wars.  When the French took Seville in 1810 their forces engaged in targeted art looting on an industrial scale (they had years of practice, having done this in Flanders, the Netherlands, Italy and every other country they occupied).   After 1815 the Spanish managed to recover the paintings which went to the Louvre but a lot of Murillos had ended up in the private collection of Marshal Soult and were untouchable (Soult had jumped ship to the Bourbon monarchy in time as was too important to the Restoration Government- struggling to handle an army crammed with Napoleonic veterans- to alienate).   Soult’s collection was dispersed at his death in the early 1850’s, in a sale which probably marked the peak of enthusiasm for Murillo’s work.

Obviously when Bourgeois and Lenfant were assembling their putative national collection for Warsaw they felt they had to have a good representation of Murillos, whether imported from Spain or acquired on the wider European market.   After some trading, the gallery’s core collection contained some dozen “Murillos”.   Some were clearly the real thing; others were (to put it politely) adventurous attributions.   As a side benefit of hosting the Neve show, Dulwich was able to undertake a thorough programme of cleaning and study of this group of works.  Perhaps unexpectedly, this actually led to a couple of “up-attributions”; one very small (you guessed it) Immaculate Conception turned out to be almost certainly an original while a Nativity scene was revealed as a very rare oil sketch done as a preparation for a major piece now in the USA.   Others, however, remain firmly in the “Anonymous- maybe done by someone who once cleaned the brushes in Murillo’s workshop” category….

The “second” show also examines the influence which Murillo’s works had in 18^th-19^th century Britain.  Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t Murillo’s religious works which were valued in Protestant countries like Britain or the Netherlands.   His reputation there rested on his genre works- especially ones which purported to depict life among the very poor and marginal groups of Seville.   These often involved children, playing into a growing elite tendency to sentimentalise young people- coupled uneasily with a clear wish to draw moral lessons.  

Both Dulwich’s specimens of this genre fit neatly into this model.   An African boy carrying a water jug reaches out hopefully for a share of a pie in the hands of a white lad, who doesn’t seem disposed to share.   A second boy, presumably a companion of the first, appears to be picking the black boy’s pocket.   Underpainting revealed by x-rays suggests that Murillo has toned down the refusal to share the pie; an earlier version gives the child holding it an even more hostile expression.  There are multiple possible stories here and the moral is quite hard to read.   The black boy may be pretty ragged in dress but he’s wearing shoes and at least potentially carrying cash, which suggests he can’t be the very lowest of the low- possibly a servant sent out to the well to fill up the water jug.   The pie, on the other hand, may well be stolen property, slipped in the basket when the stall holder's attention was distracted and being eaten as quickly as possible before it’s missed.  Is this an allegory of greed- the African boy wanting a share of a meal which others need more than him and being punished for it?   A simple warning to keep a close hold on your property and not be distracted from the job in hand?   A neutral observation of daily life in the slums of Seville?   Thieves falling out (there’s no reason why the trio couldn’t be accomplices, with the water jar also stolen goods)?   Or just lads having a lark?  ?  It’s a kind of frozen frame from a film whose beginning and end we do not know (though given how hard life in 17^th century Seville was for the poor one might fear the worst).

While it may be very tempting with contemporary eyes to read racial aspects into the picture as well, I’m not sure whether that would be justified.  17^th century Spain had no trouble with slavery (the boy in the picture may well be the child of Murillo’s slave, a woman whom he eventually freed) and some venomous prejudices against outsider groups (Jews, Muslims- or even Christians with Jewish or Muslim ancestors) but also contained aristocratic convents where the daughters of Christian African rulers were honoured sisters.  It is very hard to guess how the lines of prejudice and discrimination ran in the slums of Seville- and whether they ran in the same places amongst the city’s elites is even harder to determine.

Similar question marks surround the other Dulwich “beggar” painting.  A laughing beggar child seems to be trying to persuade another (very doubtful-looking) lad to join him in a game of “argollo” (this was apparently a primitive form of street croquet- the reclining boy is holding one of the hoops and other paraphenalia for the game can be seen on the ground- though how one found a flat and regular enough piece of land to play a game of that nature in the middle of a city as crowded as Seville is a bit of a mystery).   His true intent may well be to get his hands on the bread the other boy is eating; the rather fox-like dog is a bit more open in its intentions as it looks longingly up at the food.   The picture is full of ambiguities and uncertainties- no doubt quite intentionally. Is the beggar child mocking his uptight (but clearly better off) counterpart or simply indicating the fun to be had in walloping a ball round the streets?   Is he just looking for a game or is this an excuse to rob the other lad, who again looks like an errand boy sent out by a slightly better off household with some small change?   Is the standing boy totally hostile and contemptuous of this street riff-raff or is he actually tempted to pitch in   John Ruskin loathed this piece, positively frothing at the mouth about the vulgarity and even obscenity of the dirty feet on display- which says more about Ruskin than it does about Murillo.  If anything Murillo’s beggar paintings are probably guilty of underplaying the awfulness of slum life in Seville- the models are all remarkably well nourished looking and free from the more visible stigmata of poverty-related diseases.   In the long term Ruskin’s hostility did impact on Murillo’s reputation but the process was a slow one as far as wider taste was concerned- you could buy wallpaper with a design based on this picture in early Victorian Britain, which had its own issues with street children.

For a small exhibition, the Dulwich show offers a remarkable number of insights into the life and works of Murillo.  And the next time I’m in the National Gallery I’ll try to remember to give Justino de Neve a quick prayer…..