The Infant Christ as the Good Shepherd

Listed in 1804 Insurance list as by Murillo, the Gallery's founders probably thought they had acquired an oil sketch by Murillo or a smaller autograph version of the original painting that had belonged to Murillo's important patron Justino de Neve and was famous in France throughout the eighteenth century. Pigment analysis from the sky area, however, has proved that Prussian blue was used, a pigment not invented until 1706. The present painting is therefore an eighteenth-century copy, possibly by a French artist such as Jean-Alexis Grimou (1678-1733), whose full-size copy after the original was in England in the eighteenth century and copied by Gainsborough.