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Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (artist) Spanish, 1617 - 1682 Two Women at a Window, c. 1655/1660 oil on canvas Overall: 125.1 x 104.5 cm (49 1/4 x 41 1/8 in.) framed: 182.3 x 160.3 cm (71 3/4 x 63 1/8 in.) Widener Collection 1942.9.46 On View |
Seville's most popular painter in the later seventeenth century was Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.
While Murillo is best known for works with religious themes, he also produced a number of genre paintings of figures from contemporary life engaged in ordinary pursuits. These pictures often possess a wistful charm; Two Women at a Window is a striking example. A standing woman attempts to hide a smile with her shawl as she peeks from behind a partially opened shutter, while a younger woman leans on the window ledge, gazing out at the viewer with amusement. The difference in their ages might indicate a chaperone and her charge, a familiar duo in upper-class Spanish households. Covering one's smile or laugh was considered good etiquette among the aristocracy. An engraving made one hundred years after the painting suggested, however, an entirely different interpretation of the women. Its title, Las Gallegas (The Galician Women), implied that the women were prostitutes, because Galicia, a poor province in western Spain, provided many of Seville's courtesans. Today, scholars tend toward the first explanation of these two casually attired ladies.
The convincingly modeled, life-size figures, framed within an illusionistically painted window, derive from Dutch paintings that were meant to fool the eye.