Francisco de Zurbarán

Zurbarán worked mostly for Spanish religious institutions, and in 1629 became the official painter of Seville. In 1626 he agreed to paint a series of pictures for the Dominican monastery of San Paolo el Real. These established his reputation and one of them, a huge Crucifixion dated 1627, is in the Art Institute of Chicago. Here Christ is silhouetted against a dark featureless background, emphasizing his isolation and rejection. His next major commission was for the Mercedarian order, and one of these paintings, the Martyrdom of Saint Serapion, is at the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford. The saint’s fate was grisly, but Zurbarán suppressed the worst details, merely contrasting the exhausted and lifeless head of the saint with his off-white voluminous robe. In dramatic narrative, the artist’s skills are best seen in his series of paintings for the monastery at Guadalupe (1639–1647), many of them depicting the life of St Jerome. In a late work of 1655, in the Seville museum, he painted his most memorable image of monastic life, St Hugo in the Refectory of the Charterhouse. The story goes that the monks failed to abstain from meat during Lent, so their meat turned to ashes. This was interpreted as a hint to stick to the rules. There are few paintings that depict so compellingly the purity of the monastic ideal.

Zurbarán sometimes branched out from religious subjects. He painted a series of Labors of Hercules for the Buen Retiro Palace in Madrid and a few still lives. The most famous of these is in the Norton Simon Museum in California, surreal in its mesmerizing simplicity and luminescence. His son Juan, who trained in his studio, became a prominent still-life painter and contributed to the genre’s increasing popularity in Seville. Juan died at the age of 29, leaving behind an oeuvre of 13 paintings. Many of the products from Zurabarán’s studio were exported to the New World. At the end of his career he went out of fashion in favor of the softer more sentimental religiosity of his fellow Sevillian, Murillo.