The Young Beggar

The Young Beggar is a 1645-1650 genre painting by the Spanish artist Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, now in the Louvre in Paris.

Painting

The Young Beggar is often called The Lice-Ridden Boy because he is delousing himself. The picture is the first known depiction of a street urchin in Murillo's work. The painting was undoubtedly inspired by the rampant misery in the streets of Seville during the Golden Age. Influenced by Caravaggism, Murillo dwells on sordid details and uses stark contrasts of light and shade. Yet the boy also has the gracefulness that is the Sevillian master's hallmark.

Making

It has been suggested that Flemish merchants living in Seville may have commissioned this genre picture by Murillo. Genre painting, which depicts daily life, was greatly appreciated in Flanders, and the poor were a recurrent subject in Flemish genre painting. Murillo's interest in the needy perhaps also has something to do with the doctrine of charity of the Franciscans, for whom he frequently worked. Murillo, the last of the great painters of Spain's Golden Age, was above all a religious painter. For the Franciscans of Seville he painted a cycle of pictures to which The Angels' Kitchen (Louvre Museum) belongs.^[1]

References