Four Figures on a Step - Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

Murillo fell from a scaffold in Cadiz and died a few months later. He was sixty-four, working on a fresco at the church of the Capuchines, and the fall ended both the painting and his life. His burial in the Church of Santa Cruz in Seville did not survive either: the French demolished the church during the Peninsular War, and his remains were lost.

He was born in Seville in late 1617, the youngest of fourteen children. His father was a barber surgeon. Both parents died before he was eleven, and he was raised by an older sister and her husband, also a barber. He studied in the workshop of Juan del Castillo, his uncle and godfather, and absorbed the realism of Zurbaran and Ribera. In 1645 he received his first major commission: eleven canvases for the convent of San Francisco in Seville. The success was decisive.

Seville became his entire world. He rarely left. In 1660 he co-founded and became first president of the city's Academy of Painting. His religious paintings, particularly his Immaculate Conceptions, were reproduced and imitated across the Catholic world for the next two centuries. He also painted contemporary street life: flower girls, beggars, street urchins, recorded with an affectionate realism that constitutes a documentary record of seventeenth-century Andalusia.

For two hundred years after his death he was considered one of the greatest painters who ever lived, ranked alongside Raphael and Titian. Then opinion turned. By the late nineteenth century his religious canvases were dismissed as sentimental and treacly, and he was nearly written out of art history altogether. The reassessment continues; the sentimentality charge has not entirely lifted.