The Little Fruit Seller

The Little Fruit Seller of around 1670 at the Bavarian State Painting Collections belongs to the group of genre paintings depicting Seville's street children that made Murillo one of the most internationally collected painters of the seventeenth century. These images of children selling, eating, gambling, or simply existing in the streets of Seville documented a specific urban poverty while finding in its subjects an appealing dignity and resilience that European aristocratic collectors found irresistible. The fruit seller subject was a standard figure of Mediterranean street commerce — children hawking seasonal produce from baskets as one of the lowest-status forms of urban economic activity — yet Murillo's treatment found in the young seller the same inner life and physical presence he gave his saints and Madonnas. The Bavarian State Painting Collections in Munich hold several of Murillo's genre works as part of their comprehensive survey of Spanish Baroque painting, assembled partly through the collecting enthusiasm of the Wittelsbach dynasty for Spanish art.

Murillo renders the young vendor with his mature combination of naturalistic detail and gentle idealization. The warm, golden lighting and soft handling of the fruit still life demonstrate his ability to unify genre painting with still-life elements.