Walpole Immaculate Conception

The Walpole Immaculate Conception is an oil on canvas by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, dated to around 1680. Its subject is the Immaculate Conception, the belief that Mary was conceived without original sin, a theme widely present in seventeenth-century Spanish religious art. The painting belongs to the devotional output of an artist closely associated with this kind of image.

The work takes its name from the English politician Robert Walpole, in whose collection at Houghton Hall it once formed part. It stayed there until Catherine the Great acquired it in 1779, together with the rest of that collection. Since then its story has been tied to Saint Petersburg, where it is now held by the Hermitage Museum. Its path shows how many Spanish paintings travelled to England in the eighteenth century and, from there, on to Russia through the collecting networks of the period.

In 2013 the painting was lent back to Houghton Hall, the place where it had been kept for much of its history, allowing British visitors to see it again outside the museum walls.

The available information says little about the precise composition of the canvas, so any formal description should be treated with caution. What can be said with confidence is that the work pairs a widely popular devotional subject with a notable international history. Its interest lies both in its value as a religious image and in what it reveals about the market for and collecting of Spanish painting beyond Spain.

Painter

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

Date

1680

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

195 × 145 cm

Museum

Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg

Genre

religious art

Depicts

Immaculate Conception of Mary

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