In his warm style, come his Annunciations, Conceptions, and all those gentle and graceful Madonnas, sweet and poetic young mothers rather than divine Virgins “whom Jews might kiss and Infidels adore,” as Pope says, and which remind us of Correggio’s effeminacy, unknown to Murillo, and in which he plays with ease with harmonies, contrasts, and reflections of colour.

The Immaculate Conception, in the National Museum of the Louvre, is of this style.  Certainly it is not more beautiful than the Conception in Madrid, of such extraordinary brilliance, and of such a virginal expression of innocence, piety, and melancholy; and above all not more beautiful than that of Seville—­The Great Conception, or the Pearl of Conceptions, making the Virgin Mother’s face into a beautiful and intense face of an archangel.  That had its day of resounding triumph.

Every one knows that Marshal Soult accepted this work in Spain for the pardon of two monks condemned to be hanged as spies.  On the 29th of May, 1852, this canvas was sold at auction.  Around it the greatest nations were represented with their rival gold, and loud applause accompanied each royal bid.  When, for the sum of 615,300 francs, it was knocked down—­“To France, gentlemen!” cried the Count de Nieuwerkerke—­then broke forth the delirium of a battle won.

In a diaphanous atmosphere gilded with an invisible clearness as of Paradise, the winged heads and bodies of little angels are moving:  the former gracefully grouped, the latter boldly and skilfully disposed.  The celestial infants have followed all the way to the earth the rays of celestial light in its elusive gradations of colour under its imperceptible glazing.  In the centre, in the act of ascent, the Virgin rises in ecstasy.  One corner of a cloud, the crescent moon, and a masterly group of little angels, naked and enraptured, bear the Immaculate aloft.  Gracefully and statuesquely posed, and broadly draped in a white robe with sober folds enriched by an ample scarf of light blue, she modestly hides her feet under the drapery and chastely crosses her hands over the breast in which she feels the conception of the Son of God operating.  Her head under its dishevelled waves of black hair, a little turned back and bending slightly to one side, is raised to heaven with uplifted eyes and open mouth, as if to receive in every sense the flow of the spirit.  The face, in the exquisite sweetness of a surrender to piety, reflects the bliss of Faith, of mystical voluptuousness, and divine ecstasy.  The expression is religious, but the Virgin is human, and full of life in the firmness of her lines and the warmth of her flesh-tints.  Beneath the suppleness of the drawing and the soft touches we recognize in Mary the Immaculate, the woman and even the Andalusian.

The whole work is a most harmonious and well-balanced composition, of the greatest opulence of colour, solidly laid in, and here and there lightly glazed over in the Venetian manner; a superb work this, in which Murillo has found the right point where his idealism and his materialism meet and mingle.