How the Murillos Came to Dallas

This week was spring break and I took the opportunity to visit the Meadows Art Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.  If anyone asks, however, I was actually visiting my grandkids and the art museum was just a side trip.  I’m probably safe in revealing this since neither What’s-His-Name nor The-Other-One regularly reads this blog.

The Meadows collects Spanish Art, which is a favorite of mine.  While I did not get to see its collection of Goya etchings, I was pleasantly surprised to discover there was a special exhibition of paintings by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, particularly the six-painting series telling the biblical story of the Prodigal Son.

Murillo is one of the artists from Spain’s Golden Age, and one of the very few who became famous during his lifetime.  By any measure, the years between 1580 and 1680 were remarkable for their artistic achievements.  Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, and artists such as Diego Velasquez, El Greco, and Murillo created their masterpieces.  These achievements were all the more remarkable because, politically, the wheels were coming off the wagon of the Spanish Empire.

Highly respected for his prodigious talents, Murillo became wealthy and respected, despite living in a world that was slowly collapsing around him.  While it is amazing that any of his paintings survive, today more than four hundred of his paintings do—more than twice as many as those of Velasquez and El Greco combined.  

Murillo was born just outside of Seville, and spent almost all of his productive life there.  Unfortunately, Seville, formerly the richest city in Spain, was in steep decline during the artist’s lifetime.   Early in the sixteenth century, the King of Spain had decreed that all ships traveling to and from the New World had to use the port of Seville, fifty-six miles up the River Guadalquivir from the coast.  The gold and silver that flowed into Seville made the city incredibly rich.  Unfortunately, by the seventeenth century, the river had started silting up, preventing the ever-larger sailing ships from making their way up the river, forcing them to offload their precious cargo at Cadiz.  This would be the modern equivalent if all of the theaters, banks, and financial institutions moved from New York to Philadelphia.

This happened during the last days of Spanish rule by the Hapsburgs (a royal family that is the personification of why inbreeding is a very bad idea).  The Spanish Empire was in increasingly bad shape, the result of political and financial policies that were outmoded.  Bound by tradition, Spain could not change even as the rest of Europe surpassed it in every measurable capacity.  Perhaps the Mexican historian Carlos Fuentes said it best:  “The wealth that made Spain rich made Spain poor.”

Worse yet, in the middle of the century, the plague struck Seville, killing the eldest children of Murillo.  This was followed by the death of his beloved wife in childbirth.  Of the artist’s ten children, only three survived.  What would have ruined some men, just made Murillo work harder, and after the only trip of his life to Madrid to meet with Velasquez and to study the king’s collection of works by Titian (collecting Italian art was just about the only thing that the Hapsburgs got right), the artist’s work matured, and Murillo painted the best works of his life.

The series of six paintings by Murillo tells the story of The Prodigal Son from the gospel of Luke, chapter fifteen.  A haughty son goes to his father and demands his share of the inheritance.  When the father agrees, the son, dressed in his finest, leaves his family and travels to the city where he quickly squanders his fortune indulging himself in wine and women.  Now penniless, his new acquaintances scorn him, and he is reduced to living in rags, working as a swine herder and barely earning enough to survive.  Realizing his folly, he decides to return to his father and beg for a job working for the family he had turned his back on.  When he arrives, the father welcomes his son back, telling his other son to kill the fatted calf in celebration.  When the faithful son demands to know why the father is making such a fuss for someone so foolish, the father answers that his son, once lost, has returned from the dead to his family.  

Paintings with religious subjects were very common at the time, as many of the residents of Seville hoped that an act of piety might appease God and return a measure of success both to them and to their city.  Surprisingly, most of the details of the early history of the paintings are unknown.  They are obviously by the artist and the style is unmistakably that of the artist after his trip to Madrid, but who commissioned them and exactly when they were produced is still a complete mystery.

The only clues we have are from the paintings, themselves. The story, as depicted by Murillo, is slightly different from the biblical account, as Luke does not mention the prodigal son’s mother or sisters, figures clearly included by Murillo.  And while the inclusion of women who were obviously prostitutes in art was unusual for Spain during the Inquisition, it was perfectly acceptable for people from Flanders.  The unknown patron might very well have been a Dutch resident of Spain, someone who wanted a painting that more closely resembled his own family.  X-rays of the paintings show that both pictures that include the prostitutes were at one time rolled up, so that the resulting cracks in the underlying paint indicate that (for a while) the two paintings that might have been troublesome to the Inquisition were “hidden”.  Though several names have been suggested, we are unlikely to ever know who actually commissioned Murillo to paint the series.  

Additionally, we know nothing about who owned the paintings or where they were for over a century and a half.  In the late 18th century King Charles III outlawed the exportation of the works of several Spanish artists, including those of Murillo, so the paintings probably stayed in Spain.   The paintings were also probably among those stolen by the French under Napoleon, most of which probably never left Spain, but exactly what happened will never be known.  

What is known is that a Marquis, a director of the Prado, purchased a large number of paintings from the Prado early in the 19th century, which included the Murillo series.  Fifty years later, his family sold one of the paintings (the one portraying the prodigal son’s return) to Queen Isabella, who gifted it to Pope Pius IX.  To this day, the back of that painting displays wax seals indicating that it was part of the Vatican collection.  The remaining 5 paintings were sold in 1856 to Jose de Salamanca.  (To show how times had changed, the paintings depicting the prostitutes commanded the highest prices.)

By 1867, the Earl of Dudley purchased the five paintings from Salamanca and began lobbying the Vatican to sell the remaining painting, to reassemble the series.  Eventually, the Vatican agreed, but demanded two equally valuable paintings and 2,000 gold Napoleon coins to part with its gift.  You would be correct in assuming that the Pope was a shrewd and somewhat mercenary negotiator.

In 1896, the Earl’s heirs sold the painting to Alfred Beit, the silent business partner of Cecil Rhodes and a governor of the De Beers diamond cartel.  Having made a fortune in the South African diamond fields, Beit could afford to surround himself with fantastic art.  Besides their other art, at one time the only people to personally own paintings by Vermeer were Beit and the King of England.  (Queen Elizabeth still has hers.)

Alfred Beit left his fortune, including the artwork, to his nephew, Alfred Beit, 2nd Baronet.  After becoming an honorary citizen of Ireland, Beit purchased the Russbourough House in County Wicklow, Ireland.  This is not exactly a country cottage:  the front of the castle is 690 feet long, and you could probably fit a bowling alley into the parlor.  Still, Beit needed a little room for all the art.

Unfortunately, this conspicuous lifestyle attracted the attention of an Irish Republican Army gang led by Rose Dugdale in 1974.  (Dugdale is the Irish equivalent of Patty Hearst, except while Hearst eventually saw the error of her ways and decided being rich was more fun than being an outlaw, Dugdale, now 81, is still a wild-eyed radical.)  Forcing their way into the castle, Dugdale pistol-whipped poor Beit and the gang made off with nineteen incredibly valuable paintings including a Goya, a Vermeer and a Gainsborough.  Fortunately, they decided the Murillos were too big and heavy and left them behind.

Though the paintings were eventually recovered, Beit decided to hang them all back up in the same castle, from which the IRA stole them again in 1986.  Once again, the Murillos were left behind because of their size.  Although all but two of the paintings were eventually recovered, Beit decided that he was tired of unannounced art patrons, and donated the majority of his collection, including the Murillos, to the National Gallery of Ireland in 1987.

I have no idea how the fine people of the Meadows Museum were able to convince the people of the National Gallery of Ireland to loan the paintings out for a while.  Maybe it was just to get them farther away from the IRA.