Beggar Boys

Beggar Boys of around 1650, in the Royal Society of Medicine collection, belongs to Murillo's earliest and most celebrated series of Sevillian street children — works that established him as one of the first painters in European history to treat child poverty with sustained sympathetic dignity rather than moralising distance or comic condescension. The Royal Society of Medicine's ownership of this painting is an unusual institutional provenance, suggesting the later nineteenth century's medical profession's interest in these images as social documents of the urban poor as much as as art objects. Murillo's street children were painted with the same quality of inner life and physical presence that he gave his saints, refusing the convention that genre subjects required either idealisation or social commentary to justify their inclusion in serious painting. The two ragged boys, caught in an unguarded moment of animated conversation, have a dignity of presence that anticipates later European humanist photography in its refusal to instrumentalise its subjects for the viewer's entertainment or moral instruction.

Murillo renders the genre subject with naturalistic warmth and characteristic soft handling, using warm earth tones and gentle light to create a scene of sympathetic human observation that avoids both sentimentality and harsh social critique.