Francisco de Zurbarán

Biography

A contract of 17 January 1626 bound Zurbarán to paint twenty-one canvases in eight months for the Dominican monastery of San Pablo el Real in Seville. It was signed with him as a resident of Llerena: in Seville the painter was not yet known. Fourteen of the paintings were devoted to the life of Saint Dominic, and the rest showed Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas and the four Doctors of the Church.

Few works from this cycle survive.

Francisco de Zurbarán was born in Fuente de Cantos in Extremadura and baptized on 7 November 1598. His father, Luis de Zurbarán, was a merchant of Basque origin who had lived in the town since 1582; his mother was Isabel Márquez. Why he sometimes signed documents as Zurbarán Salazar is unknown. On 15 January 1614 he was placed in the Seville workshop of Pedro Díaz de Villanueva, about whom very little is known. His apprenticeship ended in 1617, when he married María Paes, nine years his senior, in Llerena and settled there. Three children were born in Llerena, among them his son Juan, a gifted painter who died young. His first wife died around 1624, and in 1625 Zurbarán married a widow, Beatriz de Morales. His first known painting is thought to be the “Virgin of the Clouds” (about 1619–1620).

For the sacristy of the same monastery he painted the “Crucifixion” (1627): an almost nude body with little blood, lit from the right, and the folds of the loincloth a dazzling white. To my mind, this work above all made him noticed among the religious orders of Seville. The Mercedarians (the order devoted to ransoming captives) commissioned “Saint Serapion” (1628), in which, instead of the details of the execution, he hid the body under the white habit of the order. On 29 August 1628 the same order engaged him for twenty-two canvases on Saint Peter Nolasco, and for this work he moved from Llerena to Seville. Only part of the cycle has survived, and assistants apparently took part in it. At the same time, in 1628–1629, he was painting scenes from the life of Bonaventure for a Franciscan college.

In 1629 the city council of Seville invited him to settle in the city. On 25 May 1630 he refused to take the examination required of local painters, saying that the city had called him “an eminent man”. This caused resentment among his colleagues, Alonso Cano among them. In 1631 he painted “The Apotheosis of Saint Thomas Aquinas”, the largest of his compositions, now in the Museum of Fine Arts of Seville. About two hundred paintings survive from the 1630s, many of them signed.

In 1634 Zurbarán worked in Madrid on the Hall of Realms in the Buen Retiro Palace. He painted ten canvases on the labours of Hercules, his only cycle on a mythological subject, and two pictures of the defence of Cadiz. Meeting Velázquez and seeing Italian and Flemish painting in the royal collections softened his Caravaggesque manner: the skies grew lighter and the contrasts gentler. By some accounts he received the title of painter to the king around 1630, by others in 1634–1636. In 1638–1639 he worked for the Carthusian monastery in Jerez, and from 1639 on a series for the monastery of Guadalupe. Trade with the Americas was already under way in 1638; later the workshop sent paintings to Lima and Buenos Aires. The series “Jacob and His Twelve Sons”, probably intended for the overseas market, ended up in Auckland Castle in England.

In 1639 his second wife died. On 7 February 1644 he married for the third time, a widow, Leonor de Torder, and they had six children. After 1640 tastes changed: Zurbarán’s severe manner lost out to the gentle religiosity of Murillo, and the plague of 1649 took his son Juan. His later Seville works are often uneven, and much was done in the workshop.

In May 1658 he went to Madrid to look for commissions, leaving his family in Seville. In December he gave testimony in favour of Velázquez, who was being vetted for admission to the Order of Santiago, one of Spain’s knightly orders. Private patrons replaced the monasteries as clients, and his manner softened: subtle chiaroscuro, delicate modelling of forms. His last dated work, “The Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John”, comes from 1662.

Zurbarán died in Madrid on 27 August 1664. The legend that he died in poverty is not borne out: according to the inventory of 1665, his property was modest but sufficient. He was buried in the convent of Copacabana, which was demolished in the nineteenth century; the grave is lost.