Bartolome Murillo: Marshal Soult's Rapacity

"The Immaculate Conception of
the Venerable Ones" by Murillo

"Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult was one of Napoleon's best generals, but notorious for looting artwork from territories under his command, including Spain. Indeed, the whole story of the long premeditated picture-stealing campaign of Soult fills one with indignation. Spies preceded his army, disguised as travellers, and furnished with Cean Bermudez' 'Dictionary of Spanish Art History,' were thus able to track down the prey of plate and pictures.

Convents and cathedrals - venerable shrines of art - were beset by these 'connoisseurs' provided with squadrons of soldiers, demanding the surrender of the Murillos, Canos, Zurbarans, and Pachecos within. Some may say that to strip some dark churches and convents was often to rescue fine works of art from oblivion or from the decay caused by monkish neglect; but to despoil others of its pictures was to rob them not only of their glorious heirlooms, but the poor of the charity of strangers, whom these pictures attracted and inspired gifts of charity to the institution's causes. Regardless, it was robbery.

In Seville only the Capuchin monks, who knew the intentions of the French beforehand, took down works by Murillo, moved them to Cadiz, where they hid them in private homes. They returned the artwork to Seville at the end of the war. For this reason, the Sevillian Museum of Fine Arts now has an important collection of Murillo artwork that would otherwise be hung in the Louvre or distributed in various private collections.

It was well they had done so, for Soult took the first works Murillo produced, the ten paintings produced for the Franciscan convent; 'The Birth of the Virgin' from the Cathedral of Seville, now located in the Louvre; four paintings from the church of Santa María la Blanca and the 'Immaculate Conception' painting from the Hospital de los Venerables. From the church of the Hospital de la Santa Caridad, Soult removed four paintings that would decorate his own luxurious mansion.

Although much has been written in denunciation of the collecting propensities of the French generals during the Peninsular War, it must be admitted that their robberies did draw wider attention to the stores of artistic masterpieces that until then had been unknown, unappreciated and unsuspected, hidden away in Spain. Twenty-five years before that war Murillo was very little known beyond the boundaries of his own province of Andalusia. Afterwards it was a different story."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Murillo, A Biography and Appreciation" by Albert Frederick Calvert and "The Looting of Murillo's Works."