Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

The Duchess of Aliaga, Madrid;

Marqués of Bermejillo, by 1921;

Collection of Don Félix Fernández Valdés (d.1975), Bilbao, by 1943;

Believed to have been acquired by the present owner in the late 1990's.

D. Angulo Iñiguez, ‘Miscelánea Murillesca’, in Archivo Español de Arte, 1961, pp. 11- 12, reproduced plate XV, fig. 23;

D. Angulo Iñiguez, ‘Algunos dibujos de Murillo’, in Archivo Español de Arte, 1974, pp. 100- 101;

J. A. Gaya Nuño, L’Opera completa di Murillo, Milan 1976, p. 94, reproduced no. 88;

D. Angulo Iñiguez, Murillo: Su Vida, su arte, su obra, vol II, Madrid 1981, pp. 261- 262, no. 322, reproduced vol. III, plate 151;

E. Valdivieso, Murillo: Catalogo Razonado de Pinturas, Madrid 2010, p. 335, cat. no. 104, reproduced;

J. Brown, Murillo, Virtuoso Draughtsman, New Haven and London 2012, pp. 124-5, under no. 36.

The following condition report is provided by Sarah Walden who is an external specialist and not an employee of Sotheby's: This painting has an old stretcher and fairly old lining. The restoration is very recent however. There is a narrow, old, added strip along the top edge with a few little lost flakes, and a new painted wooden strip down the right edge, visible in the frame. The original stretcher bar lines across the centre are visible, with the fine overall craquelure. The dark ground can be seen through the sky particularly at the upper right side and lower down between the figures. In these areas there are wide stretches of retouching. In the foreground and in the darks of the figures rather older varnish has been left and there is far less wear and little retouching. While the head of St Joseph is rather well preserved with a veil of old varnish, the head of the Christ Child has many small retouches. His drapery is largely finely intact however, as is the lower part of the painting almost throughout. This report was not done under laboratory conditions.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

This tender depiction of Saint Joseph with the Infant Christ can be dated on stylistic grounds to relatively early within Murillo’s career, circa 1655-60, at a time when the artist’s paintings display a greater linearity and darker palette than works from the mid-1660s onwards. Indeed the painting is one of the earliest known treatments of a subject that the artist would return to on numerous occasions throughout his career.

A reduced version of the present composition, today in the collection of the Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, Madrid, has long been considered the boceto to the present picture, however given Murillo’s oil sketches in general exhibit a far greater freedom in the overall working out of the composition, it seems more likely that this study was executed at a more advanced stage within the overall design process and its function may have been as a presentation piece by the artist painted directly prior to the final work. This in turn would explain only the minor differences, most notably the pose of the right hand of the Christ Child and the precise positioning of the flowering rod across the shoulder of Saint Joseph, between this reduced version and the artist’s final design.¹

 

Two drawings by the hand of Murillo have also been associated with the present work: a pen and brown ink with wash drawing today in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid and a pen and brown ink with brown wash over black chalk in the Cabinet des Dessins, Musée du Louvre.²  In all probability however the Madrid drawing slightly post-dates the present work (Brown dates it circa 1665) and whilst the overall design is broadly similar, the two protagonists are set further apart and the figure of Saint Joseph does not lean towards the Christ Child, removing much of the spirit of familial tenderness so apparent in the present treatment. Concerning the Paris drawing, it was Angulo who first proposed a link with the present work, yet once again despite the similarities (the pose of the Christ Child is almost identical for example) there are conspicuous differences, chiefly in the pose of Saint Joseph and the inclusion of putti above the Christ Child absent in the present work, whilst furthermore the drawing stylistically belongs to the 1670s.

 

Murillo returned to the subject of Saint Joseph with the Christ Child with a painting of similar overall mise-en-scène to the present work, today in the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg (see fig. 1).³  Datable towards the end of the artist’s career, circa 1670-75, it reveals a similar arrangement of the figures to the present work, whilst the artist has filled the composition with additional elements, notably a pair of putti upper left and a ruined tower in the right background, reducing the large expanse of sky against which the figures are silhouetted in the present work. The frequent echoes of our design in the artist’s later treatments (both drawings and paintings) may as much reflect the relative confines of the iconography for artistic interpretation as the artist’s reworking of an earlier design.

By 1943 the present work formed part of the distinguished collection of Don Félix Fernández Valdés, assembled at his home Gran Via, 15 in Bilbao, northern Spain. A highly educated man, Don Félix inherited a fortune from his uncle Don Tomás Urquijo and operated a thriving timber business between his substantial holdings in Spanish Guinea and his factories in Bilbao. He was also a passionate art collector and assembled one of the finest collections of Old Masters in Spain during the mid-20^th century. A photograph taken of the interior of the house at the time of his death in 1975 (see fig. 2) shows Murillo’s Saint Joseph with the Christ Child hanging in the niche on the right side of the Salon, whilst at the end of the room hang two large canvases by another leading Sevillian master, Francisco de Zurbarán, including his masterpiece Saint Anthony Abbott today in the Villar Mir Collection, Madrid.

We are grateful to Professor Enrique Valdivieso for independently endorsing the attribution to Murillo and for proposing a date of execution circa 1660.

1. Oil on canvas, laid on panel, 29.7 by 24.5 cm. See E. Valdivieso, 2010, op. cit., p. 335, no. 103, reproduced.

2. See J. Brown, op. cit., pp. 124-5, no. 36, reproduced and pp. 176-7, no. 64, reproduced.

3. See ibid., p. 161, reproduced fig. 55.