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Description: | Traditionally attributed to Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617-1682) this painting is more likely to be the work of an imitator of the great Spanish artist. An autograph drawing of the present composition is in the Stadelsches Kunsinstitut, Frankfurt (inv. no. 13656) suggesting that this painting may be after a lost original by the master. In the painting both the figure and the dog reveal a striking weakness of execution, lacking the compositional solidity and character-full expression that are consonant with Murillo's best work. However neither the dun colouring nor the generic background are unfamiliar to the master's work. The low-life subject of the painting handles a theme Murillo treated consistently throughout the last thirty years of his career: a street urchin sprawled on the ground, to the right, holds a stolen pie in one hand, while with the other he lowers a piece of it into his mouth drawing the hungry attention of the dog on the left. A similar relationship between a boy and a dog is seen in Murillo's genre masterpiece of 1662-72, The Pie Eaters, in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, which, as with the best of Murillo's autograph genre paintings, is rich in incidental detail and sharply lit to reveal the varied surface textures of materials and the bold chiaroscuro modelling the of figures: features that are notably absent from the Chiswick picture. Murillo's genre paintings were particularly popular in England throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century and were consequently much imitated. | Subjects: | everyday life; figure; animal (dog) | Source: | Vads | Creator: | Artist: Murillo, Bartolomé Estebán (Spanish painter and draftsman, 1618-1682) Æ Attributed to after | Identifier: | http://www.vads.ac.uk/large.php?uid=8729... | Go to resource |
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