Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, 'A Young Man Drinking', 1655-60

A young man cradles a bottle, presumably full of wine, and drinks from a smooth-sided glass. Vine leaves, a symbol traditionally associated with Bacchus, the mischievous god of wine, garland his head. He looks at us with a conspiratorial gaze and, though he might appear to be encouraging us to join him, the possessive way in which he guards the bottle suggests that he might well keep its contents all to himself.

Genre paintings are rare in the work of Murillo, and the subject of this picture remains enigmatic. The young man may be drinking wine, but he is doing so with dignity and care, holding the glass daintily by its base. He is perhaps a server at a tavern – the cloth draped nonchalantly over his shoulder seems to suggest this – but the reference to Bacchus better explains his mischievous expression.

The painting’s subject may be inspired by seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish representations of everyday life, particularly those of peasants drinking in rowdy taverns. The framing of the composition, with a life-size figure leaning on a stone ledge, finds parallels in both Murillo’s Self Portrait and A Peasant Boy leaning on a Sill.

The painting, which was considered to be by Murillo in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, entered the collection of the National Gallery in 1889 as a work by the master. Doubts were raised about the attribution in the mid-twentieth century, when it was tentatively ascribed to a French eighteenth-century imitator, but research and a conservation treatment conducted in 2021–22 have confirmed that it was, in fact, painted by Murillo.