Murillo painted this luminous composition circa 1670, a t.mes when he explored the subject of the Holy Family with a young Saint John the Baptist on several occasions. Depicted with painterly subtlety, the graceful scene is at once intimate and serene. The painting's recent conservation, which removed large areas of overpaint and a thick varnish, revealed both the high quality of the surface's painterly articulation and important pent.mes nti (see x-ray image), notably by Saint Joseph's right shoulder and the infant Christ's right foot. The soft brushwork and use of transparent glazes, especially apparent in the fluid rendering of the draperies, are characteristic of Murillo’s late work.

X-ray image of the present lot.

Long celebrated for his humanizing renditions of conventional religious subjects, Murillo focuses the composition on the infant Christ’s tender embrace of his slightly older cousin. The attentive gazes of both Mary and Joseph, the latter leaning on a staff seemingly lost in contemplation, underscore the children’s familiar rapport. Cast in a soft, almost golden light, they appear simultaneously as venerated holy characters and as an ordinary family of humble origin.

Fig. 1 Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist, oil on canvas. London, Wallace collects ion, inv. no. P58.

Murillo treated this subject in several near-contemporaneous works. As if probings the personal and theological relationships among the central protagonists, he experimented with different poses, gestures, and moods. Among these is a large work produced for the Sacristy of the Capilla de la Antigua in Seville Cathedral and today in the Wallace collects ion (fig. 1), as well as versions in Belvoir Castle, Grantham (property of the Duke of Rutland); the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge (inv. no. 1930.189); and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana.1 The existence of both a workshop variant and a slightly later copy of the present composition attests to its early success.2

1 E. Valdivieso, Murillo, Catálogo razonado de pinturas, Madrid 2010, pp. 446-447, cat. no. 266, reproduced; p. 446, cat. no. 265, reproduced; p. 448, cat. no. 267, reproduced; p. 448, cat. no. 268, reproduced.
2 For the former, see Munich, Hampel, 23 September 2021, lot 389; for the latter, see Bath, Bonham’s, 16 July 2007, lot 638.