The Adoration of the Magi

With fleeting brushstrokes, the Spanish artist Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617-82) uses this canvas to work out his initial ideas for a future, larger painting of the Adoration of the Magi. He experiments with jewel-like reds and yellows in the robes of the kings, who have arrived to worship the baby Jesus. The other figures, including the third king, Balthazar, melt into the shadowy background.

Murillo was the leading painter in seventeenth-century Seville, Spain. Oil sketches were an important part of his process and they were documented among his possessions at his death. Today, as few as twenty oil sketches survive. This example is likely a preparatory work for a larger painting of the same subject in Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, in which the figures are reversed.