Google Celebrates 400 Years Of The Spanish Baroque Painter

Today's Google Doogle paid tribute to Spanish Baroque painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. The Doodle depicts one of Murillo's famous works The Women At A Window which was painted between circa 1655-60. Murillo is accounted as one of Spain's most illustrious painters and it also known for his religious works. Several artists including English artist Thomas Gainsborough and French painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze were inspired by his work.

The unique quality of the painter is that he produced works on women and children. Born at the end of 1617, he was baptised on January 1, 1618, in Seville, Spain. During the 1640s, he travelled to Madrid and studied under one of the leading painters during the Golden Age Diego Velázquez. Diego was a court painter for King Philip IV. After Madrid, Murillo studied the works of Italian and Flemish painters, including Anthony van Dyck and Jusepe de Ribera.

He then left for his hometown, Seville, and painted 11 pictures of the convent of San Francisco. The acclaimed paintings helped Murillo rise to fame, bringing him a series of commissions that ensured he had work."Around the early 1650s, Murillo experienced a change of style, characterised by softer outlines, eventually veering towards a more vaporous effect," writes Clémence Michallon in The Independent.

The Getty Museum noted, "the market for Bartolomé Estebán Murillo's pictures was so large and lucrative that the king refused to allow their export from the country. Murillo himself never left Spain." He had produced over 400 paintings in his lifetime, and mentored many pupils. The 19th century saw the popularity of his art — deemed "overly sentimental" and "kitschy" — nosedive.

The painter, who came from a financially humble family, according to The Independent, married Beatriz de Cabrera y Sotomayor, a wealthy woman, in the 1640s. He died on April 3, 1682, around the age of 64. His works are found at Madrid’s Museo del Prado, the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, and the Wallace Collection in London, among other venues.

His famous works include is the Soult Immaculate Conception, the Vision of Saint Anthony, Joseph and Potiphar's Wife, Young Man with a Basket of Fruit or Personification of Summer, St. Peter in Tears, Apparition of the Virgin to St. Ildefonsus and Christ Healing the Paralytic at the Pool of Bethesda, 1670 and many others.