The Flower Girl

The Flower Girl is an oil on canvas by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, dated around 1665-1670, and today hangs in the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. It shows a young woman seated, smiling as she offers the flowers she holds in the fold of her shawl, a subject close to the everyday genre scenes Murillo returned to often. The handling is loose and light, and the diffused illumination, visible in particular on the cut sleeves of the girl's dress, is typical of the years when Murillo's career was at its peak. The palette is among the most luminous in his output, and the soft pinks of the flowers and the sky give the figure a gentle, approachable air.

The canvas also holds a technical surprise. An X-ray revealed another image beneath the visible surface: the lower half of a figure matching the Virgin in the Immaculate Conception of El Escorial. Researchers believe Murillo reused his canvases, at a time when he was producing several versions of that subject from 1664 onwards.

The picture has also been linked to the artist's family. His only child, Francisca María, was born deaf and entered a Dominican convent in 1671, taking the name Sister Francis Maria de Santa Rosa. Some scholars have suggested that the girl may be her, shown as a flower seller, so that the rose would allude to her new religious name. This is a plausible reading, though it cannot be confirmed.

Its later history is also notable. In the eighteenth century the British artist Francis Bourgeois acquired it for Stanislaus II Augustus, who planned an art museum in Warsaw modelled on the Hermitage. That plan never materialised, as the king abdicated in 1795, and Bourgeois bequeathed the painting in 1811 to the London gallery that holds it today.

Painter

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

Date

1665

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

1207 × 983 cm

Museum

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London Borough of Southwark

Genre

portrait

Depicts

rose, sitting, headscarf, girl, shawl, smile, sky

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