In the sundry debates about the Western canon that periodically vex our culture, attention is always focused on those who have been excluded from it, with the implicit assumption that some malign force is behind that omission. Far less discussed but no less important is the question of who has fallen out—for the back end of the canon is every bit as changeful as the front. Who, for example, now reads Tasso or Lope de Vega or even Goethe? Yet a familiarity with their writings, acquired in the original language, was once part of the essential furniture of a cultivated mind.
In art as well, there was a time when Guido Reni and Claude Lorrain figured among the most famous painters in the world. People who had never heard of Caravaggio or Vermeer had heard of them and thrilled at the very mention of their names. But although they still have their admirers—and rightly so—it would seem superfluous to observe that neither of them can now claim the sort of transcendent authority that once was his.
And yet there may be no Old Master whose fortunes rose as high, or have fallen as steeply, as those of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. In honor of the quadricentennial of his birth—he was baptized on New Year’s Day, 1618—the Frick Collection has mounted an exhibition, Murillo: The Self-Portraits, that contains several portraits and self-portraits by the artist, as well as related drawings and engravings and two scenes of contemporary life. Let it be said of the Frick that, as a recent show on Louis Quinze ormolu can attest, the vicissitudes of popular taste are not at the forefront of their attention: It is always 1915 in the rarefied galleries of this incomparable Fifth Avenue institution.
The new exhibition sheds light on the improbable cultural flowering that occurred in the Andalusian city of Seville in the second and third quarters of the 17th century. In that time, Seville gave the world Murillo as well as Diego Velázquez, Francisco de Zurbarán, and Juan de Valdés Leal. The Frick exhibition is formed around one of the finest (and most recently acquired) works in its collection, the earlier of Murillo’s two known self-portraits. It was painted between 1650 and 1655 and donated to the museum by the widow of Dr. Henry Clay Frick II in 2014. Here the painter depicts himself as a dapper, mustachioed man in the prime of life. His white shirt is visible through the slit sleeves of a jacket as dark as his eyes, his flowing hair, and the shadowy background that threatens to engulf him. Only his face is sharply, almost shrilly, illuminated. It is framed by the round opening in a piece of shattered marble that works far better pictorially than logically.
Murillo’s earlier self-portrait (ca. 1650-55) [Courtesy the Frick Collection]
For the first time in centuries, Murillo’s other self-portrait, made some 20 years later, has rejoined its fellow painting in the present exhibition. It comes from the National Gallery in London, to which an expanded version of the show will travel next. In format and tone, this later painting closely resembles the earlier one: It too depicts the painter dressed in black, looking out from a rounded stone frame. Rather it is the sitter who has changed. As his hand reaches tentatively, almost tremblingly, beyond the marble frame that contains him, he seems wearier and of course older than when we last encountered him, as though beaten down by experience. One might never guess that this was one of the richest and most celebrated painters of his age. As the chivalric pretensions of his younger self fall away, a chilly sobriety fills the void in this beautiful and moving work.
Murillo’s later self-portrait (ca. 1670) [Courtesy the National Gallery, London]
Commenting on the earlier version in 1843, Jacob Burckhardt wrote: “Compare it with the beautiful cavalieros from the court of Don Philip IV . . . by no means badly painted by Velazquez . . . and you will comprehend what it was that elevated Murillo above his own time.” Although many of our contemporaries would share Burckhardt’s admiration for this specific work, it is a fair guess that few of them would second his preference for Murillo over Velázquez, although that preference made perfect sense to many in the 19th century.
For us Velázquez is a paragon of incorruptibility. In the intensity of his gaze—whether he depicts fried eggs in a clay pot or the Duke of Olivares on his rearing steed—Velázquez sees all that rests on the surface of things and much that lies hidden, but nothing will divert him in his all-conquering quest for truth. By the same logic, however, much of Murillo seems fatally compromised, even though the quality that we find most distasteful in his art is precisely what seemed most admirable to many men and women of the 19th century. Consider Christ the Good Shepherd, a neatly composed image of Jesus as a boy of about 4, seated amid classical ruins with his left hand resting on an obliging lamb. In theory this is adorable, but for many of us today it is hard to stomach. Although this painting purports to be a humble rustic scene, the elegance of the boy’s coiffure and the scrubbed, luminous pinkness of his skin give the lie to such pretensions. It is indigestible in its saccharine equation of childhood and saintliness, in that cloying pietism that imparts an earnest glow to the child’s head and tries to pass it off as an inchoate halo. The very technique—the diffused and feathery focus of the image and the pat adequacy of the workmanship—goes far to explaining, and perhaps justifying, what so many of our contemporaries find objectionable in Murillo.
Obviously, there is more to Murillo than that. If one half of the 19th century public loved him for works like Christ the Good Shepherd (which is not in the present show), the other half, better informed by our lights, admired such proto-realist works as Two Women at a Window (which is). One of the few 19th-century dissenters at the altar of Murillo was John Ruskin. But his gripe was not with the saccharine piety of works like Christ the Good Shepherd. The target of his loathing was Murillo’s proto-realist work, those scenes of filthy street urchins and loose women that opened up to Courbet and Manet a new way of looking at the world. What he had in mind is represented at the Frick by Two Women at a Window, on loan from the National Gallery in Washington (shown in detail above). No one seems quite certain of what is going on in this image. One of the women sits, while the other stands, beside an opened window in a bold composition whose predominant brown tonalities approach monochrome. The women gaze at us with a directness that is apt to seem either charming or impertinent. Are they merely being mischievous? Are they prostitutes? Whatever the intention, the painting is stunning in conception and perfect in execution.
The truth about Murillo is that he works at a consistently high level of competence. Some of his paintings seem—to our generation, at least—to be vitiated by fakery, but others, like the self-portraits and Two Women at a Window, are exemplary. We must never forget that as regards cultural artifacts, the good does not take infection from the bad. If one artist makes 100 paintings and all of them are good, whereas another makes 1,000 of which 100 are good, then, ceteris paribus, mustn’t we esteem them equally? In fact, Murillo made far more excellent paintings, and of far greater variety, than can be suggested in the narrow scope of this review. But even if he had done nothing more than the works on view at the Frick, those by themselves would be quite sufficient to deserve our admiration.
James Gardner is completing The Louvre: A History, to be published by Grove Atlantic in 2019.
