> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://blog.fineartamerica.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s Ten Most Famous Paintings
- URL: https://blog.fineartamerica.com/bartolome-esteban-murillo-ten-most-famous-paintings/
- Published: 2026-05-25T09:55:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-21T18:56:20.000Z
- Description: Radiant Madonnas and ragged street children: the ten works that made Murillo the most beloved painter of Golden Age Spain.
- Author: Fine Art America
- Tags: Famous Paintings, Art History

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–1682) was born in Seville, the youngest of fourteen children, and orphaned before he was ten. He barely left the city again. While Velázquez went north to serve the king in Madrid, Murillo stayed among the merchants, monasteries, and charitable brotherhoods of a port town that was still the gateway to Spain’s American empire — and he became its greatest painter, admired across Europe within his own lifetime.

His reputation rests on two very different bodies of work. There are the devotional pictures: Virgins, saints, and Holy Families painted with a warmth and softness that made faith feel domestic rather than terrifying. And there are the beggar children — barefoot boys eating fruit, girls at windows, women picking through hair on a doorstep — painted with such affection that collectors in Britain and France spent the next two centuries chasing them. Murillo died in 1682, some months after a fall from scaffolding while at work on an altarpiece in Cádiz. Here are ten of his most famous paintings.

## [The Immaculate Conception](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/10-the-immaculate-conception-bartolome-esteban-murillo.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![The Immaculate Conception by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/10-the-immaculate-conception-bartolome-esteban-murillo-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/10-the-immaculate-conception-bartolome-esteban-murillo.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

No subject is more closely tied to Murillo’s name. Seventeenth-century Seville campaigned passionately for the doctrine that the Virgin was conceived free of original sin, and its painters worked to an agreed formula: a young woman in white and blue, standing on a crescent moon, lifted into a golden sky on a cloud of cherubs. Murillo returned to it more than twenty times and made the image his own — younger, softer, and more human than anyone else managed, with the light seeming to dissolve the edges of her robes. His treatment became the standard version of the subject throughout Spain and Spanish America, and one of his canvases was, for a while in the nineteenth century, the most expensive painting ever sold.

## [The Return of the Prodigal Son](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/5-the-return-of-the-prodigal-son-bartolome-esteban-murillo.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![The Return of the Prodigal Son by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/5-the-return-of-the-prodigal-son-bartolome-esteban-murillo-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/5-the-return-of-the-prodigal-son-bartolome-esteban-murillo.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Painted around 1667–70 for the church of the Hospital de la Caridad in Seville, this belongs to a cycle Murillo made on the theme of charity for a brotherhood that sheltered the destitute. The ragged son kneels at his father’s feet while servants hurry up with a fresh robe and a gold dish of ornaments, a small white dog leaps at his heels, and at the left a boy leads in the fatted calf. Murillo gives the moment no theatrical crescendo — the father simply bends and takes hold of him. The picture crossed to Britain in the wake of the Napoleonic wars and now hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

## [The Holy Family with a Little Bird](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-holy-family-in-an-interior-bartolome-esteban-murillo.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![The Holy Family with a Little Bird by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/the-holy-family-in-an-interior-bartolome-esteban-murillo-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-holy-family-in-an-interior-bartolome-esteban-murillo.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Here the Holy Family is a carpenter’s household. Joseph sits with the Christ Child balanced on his knee; the boy holds a small bird up out of reach of a white puppy standing on its hind legs, while Mary looks up from a basket of linen at her side. Nothing marks the figures as divine — no haloes, no angels, only a shaft of light through a bare interior. Murillo painted the subject in the 1650s, and the best-known version hangs in the Prado in Madrid. Its enormous popularity came from exactly this: it turned scripture into something a family in Seville would recognize as their own evening.

## [Four Figures on a Step](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/7-four-figures-on-a-step-bartolome-esteban-murillo.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Four Figures on a Step by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/7-four-figures-on-a-step-bartolome-esteban-murillo-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/7-four-figures-on-a-step-bartolome-esteban-murillo.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

One of the strangest and most magnetic of Murillo’s street pictures. Four people crowd a low step and press right up against the picture plane: a grinning boy with a torn shoulder, a young woman lifting her veil, an older woman in spectacles with a sleeping child sprawled across her lap. Three of them stare straight out at us with an intimacy that feels almost confrontational. Scholars have argued for centuries about whether the scene carries a sly moral about procuresses and prostitution or is simply a group of neighbors on a hot afternoon. It hangs today in the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, and it has never stopped provoking arguments.

## [Two Peasant Boys](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-two-peasant-boys-bartolome-esteban-murillo.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Two Peasant Boys by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/3-two-peasant-boys-bartolome-esteban-murillo-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-two-peasant-boys-bartolome-esteban-murillo.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Two barefoot boys occupy a plain corner of Seville. One stands in a worn brown smock, eating a piece of bread with a jug in his free hand and a small dog gazing up at him; the other sprawls on the ground, grinning, with a basket behind him and the wooden balls and paddles of a street game scattered at his feet. Murillo painted dozens of pictures like this from the 1650s onward, and they were bought almost exclusively by foreign collectors — Flemish merchants in Seville first, then the British and French aristocracy. The appeal is easy to feel and hard to explain: the children are genuinely poor, the clothes genuinely ragged, and yet the pictures carry no pity and no sermon, only a painter’s pleasure in a candid face and a fall of light on a bare shoulder.

## [The Good Shepherd](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-the-good-shepherd-bartolome-esteban-murillo.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![The Good Shepherd by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/3-the-good-shepherd-bartolome-esteban-murillo-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-the-good-shepherd-bartolome-esteban-murillo.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Christ appears here as a curly-haired toddler in a violet cloak over a pale tunic, one hand resting on a shepherd’s crook, a lamb pressed against his knee and a landscape of broken columns behind him. Painted around 1660, it is Murillo’s most disarming piece of theology: the doctrine of Christ as shepherd of souls delivered by a child who looks like any child in the street. The picture hangs in the Prado, and few paintings in that museum are copied more often. It is also a clear illustration of how Murillo won his enormous audience — he made devotional images that people wanted to live with.

## [Virgin and Child](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/11-virgin-and-child-bartolome-esteban-murillo.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Virgin and Child by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/11-virgin-and-child-bartolome-esteban-murillo-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/11-virgin-and-child-bartolome-esteban-murillo.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Murillo painted the Madonna and Child over and over, and versions of this composition are among the most reproduced images in Spanish art. The Virgin sits in a rose-red dress with a blue mantle across her lap, her head inclined, while the Child — plump, fair-haired, entirely absorbed in the moment — reaches up to touch her. The background is nothing but warm shadow, so the two figures glow out of it. What is remarkable is how little the picture insists on: no crown, no throne, no attendant saints. Murillo trusts a mother and a baby to carry the whole weight of the subject, and they do.

## [Saint Francis of Assisi Embracing the Crucified Christ](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/saint-francis-of-assisi-embracing-the-crucified-christ-bartolome-esteban-murillo.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Saint Francis of Assisi Embracing the Crucified Christ by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/saint-francis-of-assisi-embracing-the-crucified-christ-bartolome-esteban-murillo-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/saint-francis-of-assisi-embracing-the-crucified-christ-bartolome-esteban-murillo.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Christ leans down from the cross and frees one arm to draw Saint Francis into an embrace, while the saint, in his brown habit, kicks a globe away beneath his feet — the world renounced. Painted in the late 1660s for a Capuchin house in Seville, it is one of Murillo’s boldest inventions, taking a vision reported in Franciscan literature and staging it as a physical act of tenderness. Two small angels look on from the arms of the cross. For all its mystical subject, the picture is built on something completely direct: the weight of one body held by another.

## [The Adoration of the Magi](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/4-adoration-of-the-magi-bartolome-esteban-murillo.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![The Adoration of the Magi by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/4-adoration-of-the-magi-bartolome-esteban-murillo-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/4-adoration-of-the-magi-bartolome-esteban-murillo.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

The eldest of the three kings kneels bare-headed at the front of the picture in an ermine-lined cope of gold brocade, its long train held up by two children, with the open casket of his gift on the ground beside him. The Christ Child lies on a bundle of straw laid across a stone ledge, and Mary draws back the cloth so that the old man can see him. Behind them press the two younger magi holding gold vessels, turbaned attendants, and soldiers with spears, while the star breaks through the clouds above the ruined stable. It dates from the 1650s, when Murillo was establishing himself as Seville’s leading painter.

## [Don Andrés de Andrade y la Cal](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-don-andres-de-andrade-y-la-cal-bartolome-esteban-murillo.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Don Andrés de Andrade y la Cal by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/3-don-andres-de-andrade-y-la-cal-bartolome-esteban-murillo-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-don-andres-de-andrade-y-la-cal-bartolome-esteban-murillo.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Murillo painted relatively few portraits, and this full-length of a Sevillian gentleman is among the finest. Don Andrés stands in sober black against a stone pier, hat in one hand, a coat of arms carved above him, with a large white hound leaning affectionately into his thigh. The restraint is total — no gesture, no props beyond the dog — and the effect is a kind of quiet self-possession that Velázquez would have recognized. The dog does most of the emotional work in the picture. It hangs today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Murillo has been loved, then dismissed as too sweet, then loved again, and the pendulum keeps swinging back toward him for a reason: almost alone among the great Baroque painters, he is easy company. His Virgins, shepherd boys, and street children bring warmth into a room without demanding anything from it, and a Murillo above a mantelpiece looks as natural today as it did in an eighteenth-century English country house.

[Shop Bartolomé Esteban Murillo prints here](https://fineartamerica.com/art/bartolome+esteban+murillo?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com), and explore the rest of our famous paintings collection for more of the world’s most beloved masterpieces.