* Bartolomé Esteban Murillo Seville 1618 - 1682

Simon Meller, Budapest;
Anton Schmid, Vienna;
Victor Bloch, his sale, London, Sotheby's, 13 May 1964, lot 19

D. Angulo Iniguez, 'Miscelánea murillesca,' Archivo Espanol de Arte, vol. 34, 1961, pp. 14-15, illustrated figs. 31-2;
D. Angulo Iniguez, 'Algunos dibujos de Murillo,' Archivo Espanol de Arte, vol. 47, 1974, pp. 97-98;
G. McKim Smith, Spanish Baroque Drawings in North American Collections, exhibition catalogue, Lawrence, University of Kansas Museum of Art, 1974, p. 51;
J. Brown, Murillo and His Drawings, Princeton 1976-77, pp. 182-4, cat.no. 94, recto and verso illustrated 

Drawings by Murillo are rare, and this double-sided study must be one of the last he executed, made for his final documented work, the high altar of the Capuchin Church in Cadiz.  The painting was begun in around 1680, but Murillo died two years later without finishing the work, and it was completed by his assistant Francisco de Meneses Osorio.  Palomino, the 17th century writer, even claimed that Murillo met his death after falling from the scaffold erected for the painting, but there is some doubt that the artist ventured to Cadiz at all.  Instead, it has been suggested that the altarpiece was mostly executed in Seville by Osorio, and then transported on completion.  Whilst the study on the recto is clearly for the composition of the altarpiece, the function of the sketch on the verso is somewhat less certain.  The 1964 Sotheby's catalogue suggested that it is a study for the Madonna of the Capuchins, painted for the monastery at Cadiz and now in the Seville Museum, but Brown (loc.cit.) does not support this view.  Depicting a Franciscan or Capuchin friar before the Virgin and Child, it could, however, easily be identified as the Vision of Saint Felix of Cantalice, a highly appropriate subject for a Capuchin church.  Intriguingly the verso is inscribed and initialled, apparently by Murillo: La erre, 'I made a mistake'.  Perhaps the artist mistakenly supposed these figures to be part of the intended subject of the altarpiece, before realising his error and starting afresh. 

In recent years only a tiny handful of significant drawings by Murillo have come onto the market.  Most of those, like the two drawings from the Koenigs Collection, sold in these Rooms on 23 January 2001 (lots 1 and 26) have been rather more finished and decorative in nature, and this freely executed, double-sided working drawing, connected with the artist's final painting, is a very important example of a rarely-seen aspect of his work.