The Pie Eaters

The Pie Eaters of around 1670 at the Bavarian State Painting Collections is among Murillo's most celebrated genre paintings of Sevillian street children — the ragged boys consuming their meagre food with unconcealed relish becoming one of the most widely reproduced images of child poverty treated with sympathetic dignity rather than sentimental charity or moralising distance. Seville in the mid-seventeenth century had experienced catastrophic population decline from plague, repeated flooding, and economic contraction as Spanish America's silver trade diminished, leaving the city with a large population of impoverished children whose visible poverty was an everyday feature of urban life. Where Flemish genre painters treated child poverty as comic or picturesque, Murillo approached these subjects with a directness that acknowledged poverty's reality while finding in his subjects' resilience and pleasure a form of human dignity. The international collectors who avidly purchased these genre scenes — English, French, and German buyers as well as Spanish — found in them a humanist vision of childhood that transcended the documentary circumstances of Seville's economic decline.

Murillo renders the children with naturalistic tenderness, using warm earth tones and soft chiaroscuro to create an atmosphere of intimate observation. The loose, fluid brushwork of his mature style brings vivid life to the textures of rough clothing and simple food.