Discusión

It is important to note that although Murillo’s genre paintings may give the appearance of empirical reality through their naturalistically modelled figures, this is very

deceptive. Although the children are ill-kempt, dressed in ragged clothes with either dirty bare feet or dilapidated shoes, their plump, well-fed look contrasts with the usual visual signs of extreme poverty such as malnutrition, sickness and disability which are evident in Murillo’s paintings of the poor as objects of mercy in his religious works such as Saint Thomas of Villanueva distributing Alms, c. 1665-68, or Saint Elizabeth,

Queen of Hungary, Attending the Sick, 1667-70, and which convey the mainstream

socio religious discourse of seventeenth-century Iberia. Indeed, art historians have speculated that Murillo may have used his own children as models for those in his genre paintings. They certainly bear little resemblance to the grotesque portrayals of beggars in Les Gueux, c. 1622 (fig. 156), a series of etchings by Jacques Callot, whose work was known to Murillo, as discussed in relation to his use of prints in chapter 4.51

Nor can they easily be accommodated within the traditional discourse of deserving and undeserving poor. Pérez de Herrera’s treatise Discursos del amparo de los legítimos

pobres y reducción de los fingidos; y de la fundación y principio de los albergues destos reinos, y amparo de la milicia dellos (1598) is notable for its vitriolic attacks on

idleness and “false” beggars, considered by him to be the root cause of society’s ills. In his letter to the reader at the start of the treatise, Pérez de Herrera writes about the need

50 _{Murillo’s patron, Nicolás Omazur owned a small genre painting by Adriaen Brouwer and another by}

David Teniers: see Duncan Kinkead, “The Picture Collection of Don Nicolas Omazur”, The Burlington Magazine, (vol. 128 1986,) p. 140, nos. 88 and 89.

to rid Spain of false vagabonds (“quitar de España los fingidos, falsos, engañosos, y

vagabundos”) who usurp the alms of others, transgress the good laws and customs of

these realms and who provoke the wrath of God onto the whole town as a result of their sins and excesses, causing contagious infections and pernicious illnesses.52 The first discourse is filled with stories about the many tricks that false beggars adopt to gain alms and avoid working, such as making false ulcers, pretending to be blind and deaf, twisting the feet or hands of their newly born children. Above all, in addition to setting a bad example and taking alms which would be better shared amongst the real poor, these phony beggars are said to put everyone’s health at risk by corrupting the air with the stench and decay emanating through their breath and the sweat of their filthy bodies, by eating putrid food thrown out of houses and drinking large quantities of bad water and wine in preference to working, so that they cause typhus and plague, particularly in hot, humid places such as Seville in summer.53 In the third discourse, Pérez de Herrera addresses the problem of how to care for children and orphans, especially female orphans who, lacking fathers, are in great danger in a world full of carnal sins. 54 Abandoned infants and poor children were to be distributed by prelates and the

Corregidor among wealthy families who will take charge of them and later make use of

them as servants, provided they rewarded them for their services. The rest should be placed in orphanages, las casas de expósitos, or lodged in the albergues along with the poor women until the age of seven. After this, healthy girls were to be married or placed in convents. 55 Healthy boys aged between ten and fourteen, who at present wander about lost, should be sent to ships or galleys to become sailors (greatly needed by the state) while others would be put to use in the armouries and tapestry factories which would save the king the expense of importing arms and materials from abroad. 56 Murillo’s boys, however, appear more than able to take care of themselves and certainly adept at avoiding the fate of being lodged in one of Seville’s badly run and poorly resourced orphanages or, worse still, of being sent to the galleys. In the case of

Three Boys Playing Dice, they appear well provided with the means of feeding

52 _{Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera, Amparo de Pobres, pp. 13-14. “Usurpadores de la limosna de los otros,}

transgresores de las buenas leyes y costumbres de los reinos…provocadores con sus pecados y excesos de la ira de Dios contra todo el pueblo, y causa de los contagios y enfermedades perniciosas…”

53 _{Ibid, p. 42-3.} 54 _{Ibid, p. 83.} 55 _{Ibid, pp. 103-4.} 56 _{Ibid, pp. 105-6.}

themselves without begging by earning small amounts of money as basket boys or as fruit sellers and this is true of all seven of Murillo’s genre paintings of groups of street urchins.

Murillo’s gamblers also seem far removed from the gangs of thugs described by the Jesuit, Padre Pedro de León, (1545 – 1632), in the invaluable personal record of his work as a preacher/missionary in Andalucía and as chaplain in the Royal Prison of Seville between the years of 1578 and 1616. In chapter three, there is a characteristically vivid description of Seville’s thugs and gangs: “muchos hombres desalmados,

delincuentes, inquietos, valentes, valentones, bravotines, espadachines y matadores y forajidos” who appeared to be beyond the reach of the city’s justices.57 He describes bloody fights in los apedreaderos every feast day and Sundays which were marked by murders and casualties, and records how people would rush out to the gates of

“Marchena” and Cordoba and to the walls as if they were going to see jousts and tournaments.58 Gang wars continued in spite of the efforts by the Governor, Francisco Zapata, Conde de Barajas, and his sheriffs, to tackle such fights, such was the strength of these barbarous, indomitable and irrational people.59 Nonetheless, Pedro de León asserts that the great power of God was able to prevail against them and describes how, on the day of Santa Cruz in May, he and some honourable penitents marched to the field of battle with the standard of Christ, and persuaded the two sides to give up their slings, knives, skewers, small shields and other warlike instruments which were collected at the foot of the cross: “hondas, terciadillos, cuchillejos, asadorsillos, broquelejos,

tapadorsillos de tinajas, y otros instrumentos bélicos…más duras y crueles de lo que se puede imaginar”.60 All singing the Christian doctrine, they came to his college, praising the Lord, for: “they marvelled, and glorified God, which had given such power unto men” [Matthew, 9:8]61

Nor do these youngsters appear to have been much affected by the great purging of people through enlistment, plague and violent death in the previous twenty years: “la

grande saca de gente por levas, pestes y muertes violentas, con lo cual ha purgado la multitud de gente”, described by the arbitrista and mercantilist writer, Martinez de Mata

57 _{Pedro de León, Grandeza y Miseria, p. 29.} 58 _{Ibid, pp 29-30.}

59 _{Ibid, p. 30.} 60 _{Ibid, pp. 32-4.} 61 _{Ibid, p. 35.}

in his near contemporaneous text Memorial en razón del remedio de la despoblación,

pobreza y esterilidad de España written between 1650 and 1660 in Seville.62 _{They do}

not suffer the fate of the legitimate native poor people who have alms taken away from them by the foreigners so hated by Mata, especially the French.63

Neither would they have been helped by the protectionist laws and network of Royal Banks to encourage economic development which Mata proposes would enable Spain to become great again.64 However, he would undoubtedly have considered them idle, poor and unable to contribute taxes and therefore at risk of rioting: “Por lo cual están pobres

y se hallan sin fuerzas para poder ayudar a la hacienda Real, con riesgos de tumultos”,

part of the steep decline of a productive population and the ruin of agriculture, manufacture and commerce in Spain which resulted from the impact of foreign imports.65

7.5 “A selective fictitious construct”

I would argue that, while Three Boys Playing Dice is a painting that is sympathetic to the plight of impoverished youngsters in Seville and includes details of everyday social life, it was a synthesis of fact and invention and its primary function was to give

aesthetic pleasure to the viewer and knowledgeable collector, who was most probably from Northern Europe, though there appears to have been a small market for this type of work in Madrid66. Murillo’s painting, as Wayne E. Franits observed of Dutch art in the Golden Age, is “a selective fictitious construct” which was forged by an artist “in

62 _{Martínez de Mata, Memoriales y discursos, p. 337.}

63 _{Ibid, VII, p. 166: “Se han alzado con la limosna de los naturales pobres, que por lisiados, o vejez, no}

pueden adquirir para sustentarse, y los haraganes, vagabundos de Francia y otros Reinos, como no los consienten en sus naturalezas, andan en España, como en país común, que tiene escala franca, robando la limosna a los naturales y legítimos pobres, sin que nadie les pida cuenta de su modo de vivir, contra las leyes, que ordenan que los naturales que fueren holgazanes sean excluidos, como enemigos de la República.”

64 _{Ibid, VIII, pp. 75-7; 231-3; 107.} 65 _{Ibid, VI, 14, p. 146.}

66 _{See notes attached to the painting of Two Boys Playing Dice in Brooke and Cherry, Scenes of}

Childhood, p. 122, which describe a small canvas by Murillo of children playing games valued at 400 reales and two larger copies listed in the 1707 inventory of the Madrid doctor Tomás Fernández; see also Angulo, Murillo, vol. II, p. 301.

response to pictorial traditions, to personal aesthetic interests and even to demands of the market”.67

The boys represented in the painting are essentially being offered as objects for the viewer’s contemplation and enjoyment rather than as individual subjects worthy of self- representation. However, the painting also demonstrates the power of art to elevate even the humblest person as a fit subject for a work of art and to unwittingly immortalize the subject. While the children’s shirts and breeches may be contemporary, the artist converts their tattered clothing into graceful swathes of drapery and, as Peter Cherry noted, this enables Murillo to reprise the appealing interaction of nude and clothed parts of the body usually associated with history painting and the statues of classical

antiquity.68 This stratagem is common to his later genre paintings such as Murillo’s other painting of the same topic, Two Boys Playing Dice, now in Vienna (fig. 145), and is particularly pronounced in the two small head-and-shoulder portrait-like paintings of a young smiling boy, Smiling Boy Leaning on a Sill, c. 1675, The National Gallery, London, and Young Girl Lifting her Shawl, c. 1670-1675, private collection (figs. 143 and 144). In the case of the former, the boy’s shirt is attractively draped in folds around his shoulder mimicking classical drapery and was altered to reveal more of his chest and the virtuoso foreshortening of the shoulder area.69

In Three Boys Playing Dice, as in many of his other genre pictures, Murillo has

included an attractive still-life vignette of a basket filled with skilfully painted fruit and a piece of pottery positioned prominently in the painting’s foreground to catch the eye of the beholder. Their presence signals to the viewer that the children are not beggars but rather children who survive through skilfully negotiating menial tasks. The type of basket and jar varies from painting to painting, but they are both present in his very first genre painting, Urchin Hunting Fleas, and in all of seven of his depictions of groupings of two or three street urchins. These are reminiscent of the collections of everyday utensils prominently displayed in the foreground of Netherlandish genre paintings and of the large pitchers in the foreground of Murillo’s The Marriage Feast at Cana, but they also function as indicators of status and role and thus help in establishing the social identity manifested by the paintings’ subjects. The jug in Three Boys Playing Dice,

67 _{Wayne E. Franits, Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art,}

(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 13-14.

68 _{Brooke and Cherry, Scenes of Childhood, p. 26.} 69 _{Brooke and Cherry, Scenes of Childhood, p. 26.}