After Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, The Birth of the Virgin

This is a nineteenth-century copy of a much larger painting Murillo made for Seville Cathedral in 1660 (Louvre, Paris). Murillo’s original was displayed in a lunette, a semi-circular wall surface, in the chapel of the Immaculate Conception. Sevillians were especially devoted to the Immaculate Conception – the belief that the Virgin Mary was conceived without sin – and Murillo often painted the subject.

In his painting, Murillo explored the theme of the Virgin’s infancy. Here we see her in a domestic setting, as a newborn baby being taken out of the bath. Several women and angels gaze affectionately at the infant, and a group of angels descends from heaven – two are already on the ground, removing a towel from a wicker basket. The Virgin’s mother, Saint Anne, lies in a canopied bed in the background and her father, Saint Joachim, is seated nearby. On the right, two servants dry clothing by a fireplace.

During the French occupation of Seville by Joseph Bonaparte, this painting and numerous other works by Murillo were removed from ecclesiastical buildings and sent to France. The Birth of the Virgin was taken to Paris and hung in the Louvre (then called the Musée Napoléon) during or shortly after 1810, when this copy was almost certainly painted. We know that it was made after 1804: infrared photography revealed that cobalt blue, a pigment only discovered after this date, was used for the blue shawl of the kneeling woman on the right.

The work we see here is very sketchy and does not reproduce every detail of the original composition. It is rather accomplished as a copy, even though we do not know who painted it.