Bartolomé Esteban Murillo: Google doodle on 400 years of Spanish baroque painter

He led a tragic life, since Murillo, the youngest of a family of 14 children, lost his father at the age of nine and his mother a few months later.

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617-82) was the most celebrated Spanish Baroque painter in mid-seventeenth-century Seville. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo's artworks is known for his religious paintings and portraits. He produced lively, realist portraits of flower girls, street urchins, and beggars recording everyday life of his times.

He led a tragic life, since Murillo, the youngest of a family of 14 children, lost his father at the age of nine and his mother a few months later. Added to that, he lost his wife and four of the nine children they had together. After the death of his parents, he became a ward of his sister's husband and seldom used his father's surname; Instead took his surname from his maternal grandmother, Elvira Murillo.

However, from a very young age, he showed his painting skill and performed a renovating work, luminous and with an impressive and unusual use of color. All these discoveries were born of his own context, a land full of nuances, between decadence and the circumstance of being the gate from America into Europe.

He found his inspiration in the city of Seville to create his powerful paintings. His art sprang from the roots of Sevillian culture, even literally, because he created his pigments with the water from the Guadalquivir River.

And, at the same time, Murillo sought inspiration everywhere, from Zurbarán and Ribera to Venetian painting. From this agile gathering of elements by the master, who was a tireless researcher hunting for the purity of image, came the success that his paintings had in his time.

Soon, many of his paintings illuminated churches, convents, palaces, and mansions in the city. His fame quickly spread throughout Spain and Europe until it finally crossed the Ocean.

Murillo was one of the great portraitists of his time, with revolutionary works like his 'Self-portrait', in which he managed to cross the barrier of the frame to enter into the third dimension terrain, or those of social themes, in which he reproduced the people of his time.

In addition, he executed a large collection of religious works, with a predilection for the subject of the Immaculate Conception, to which he gave light and sweetness. Many of these paintings are found in the most prestigious art galleries in the world; and others, however, continue in the place for which they were created.

On this 400th anniversary of his birth, Google pays tribute to the painter with a doodle on him.