Murillo had three periods, as he also had three styles according to the nature of the subjects he had to treat:  the first period, under the influence of the Florentine formulas of Juan del Castillo, was somewhat that of happy and masterly imitations; the second, under the memories of Van Dyck, brought back by Pedro de Moya and of the copies painted at Madrid, belongs to the Flemish school.  But, at thirty-five, in full possession of his genius, he reveals himself, with his superb colouring, his consummate ease, his great science, his rich and inexhaustible imagination, his exquisite and tender sentiment, and his harmony, often produced with feminine delicacy and childish grace, with his vigour, his trivialities, and his mysticism.

The genius of Murillo, in fact, obeyed a double current, which carried him forward, on the one hand towards the sky, and on the other towards the earth, towards the Catholic ideal or towards vulgar realities, gentle Madonnas alternately with knavish beggars.  Very sincerely and observantly religious, with the contemplative soul of the land of great men and great mysteries, Saint John of the Cross and Saint Theresa, this chaste artist, who never painted a nude woman, has the exalted sentiment of faith of the Spanish artists, a sentiment which is somewhat ennobled by their realism of nature.

“Why don’t you finish that Christ?” asked one of his friends.

“I am waiting until he comes to speak to me,” replied Murillo.

With these works he enriched the chapter-house of the Seville Cathedral, the Hospital de la Caridad, that of the Hospital de los Venerables, the convents of the Capuchins, the Augustines, etc.

I have said that Murillo had three styles, almost three pencils, not like the pencils of gold, of silver, and of iron that the Venetians attributed to the unequal genius of Tintoret, but in sympathy with the subjects he had to treat.  The Spaniards have distinguished and qualified these styles as follows:  Frio, calido y vaporoso, cold, warm, and vaporous.

In the cold style he painted broadly, boldly, and frankly his beggars and his muchachos, so true to life and in strong relief, with a certain brutality almost approaching triviality.  A very well-known work of this kind is the Pouilleux in the Museum of the Louvre, and a masterpiece in the Pinacothek of Munich, the Grandmother and Infant.  He sought these types in some old Moorish dwelling, on the deck of a ship from Tunis or Tripoli anchored in a Spanish harbour, or in among a band of wandering Gitanos on the banks of the Guadalquivir.

In the vaporous manner, which he used in rendering the ecstasies of the saints, he painted (under indescribable transparencies of light and atmospheric shade which is really only extinguished light), Saint Francis in Ecstasy, The Angel Kitchen (Miracle of San Diego) running through several scales of tones in a marvellous chord and softening all the outlines “dulcemente perdidos,” as Cean Bermudez says.