e first period, under the
influence of the Florentine formulas of Juan del Castillo, was somewhat
that of happy and masterly imitations; the second, under the memories of
Van Dyck, brought back by Pedro de Moya and of the copies painted at
Madrid, belongs to the Flemish school. But, at thirty-five, in full
possession of his genius, he reveals _himself_, with his superb
colouring, his consummate ease, his great science, his rich and
inexhaustible imagination, his exquisite and tender sentiment, and his
harmony, often produced with feminine delicacy and childish grace, with
his vigour, his trivialities, and his mysticism.

The genius of Murillo, in fact, obeyed a double current, which carried
him forward, on the one hand towards the sky, and on the other towards
the earth, towards the Catholic ideal or towards vulgar realities,
gentle Madonnas alternately with knavish beggars. Very sincerely and
observantly religious, with the contemplative soul of the land of great
men and great mysteries, Saint John of the Cross and Saint Theresa, this
chaste artist, who never painted a nude woman, has the exalted sentiment
of faith of the Spanish artists, a sentiment which is somewhat ennobled
by their realism of nature.

"Why don't you finish that Christ?" asked one of his friends.

"I am waiting until he comes to speak to me," replied Murillo.

With these works he enriched the chapter-house of the Seville Cathedral,
the Hospital de la Caridad, that of the Hospital de los Venerables, the
convents of the Capuchins, the Augustines, etc.

I have said that Murillo had three styles, almost three pencils, not
like the pencils of gold, of silver, and of iron that the Venetians
attributed to the unequal genius of Tintoret, but in sympathy with the
subjects he had to treat. The Spaniards have distinguished and
qualified these styles as follows: _Frio, calido y vaporoso_, cold,
warm, and vaporous.

In the cold style he painted broadly, boldly, and frankly his beggars
and his _muchachos_, so true to life and in strong relief, with a
certain brutality almost approaching triviality. A very well-known work
of this kind is the _Pouilleux_ in the Museum of the Louvre, and a
masterpiece in the Pinacothek of Munich, the Grandmother and Infant. He
sought these types in some old Moorish dwelling, on the deck of a ship
from Tunis or Tripoli anchored in a Spanish harbour, or in among a band
of wandering _Gitanos_ on the banks of the Guadalquivir.