ABSTRACT
Bartolome Esteban Murillo was born in Seville in the last days of 1617, to a numerous family of modest but sufficient means. Having been orphaned of both parents at the age of ten, he was placed in the custody of his brother-in-law, who raised him at home until he began his apprenticeship as a painter. That apprenticeship probably began in 1633, under the tutelage of a relation, the painter Juan del Castillo, in whose house he would remain until 1638. The commission that marks the beginning of Murillo's brilliant career, and in which his own style begins to define itself, was a great cycle of large canvases with Franciscan stories, which he painted for the small cloister of the Convent of San Francisco in Seville between 1645 and 1646. That same year of 1645 he married, a union that would give him nine children.
