In an effort to retreat from the heat of the Seville day I looked for an indoor activity. In one of those wonderful, serendipitous travel events I stumbled across the Seville Museum of Fine Arts.
My usual position on arts museums in provincial cities is that they don’t have much to offer but like many unthought out positions this one turned out to be wrong.
We set off to find the museum while it was still relatively cool. We crossed the bridge into the main part of town, running a gauntlet of festive firemen who were conducting games for kids and first aid instructions. It was another cloudless, blue sky, postcard day. After only a few wrong turns down twisty side streets we found the museum. It is housed in a former church and monastery that was run by the Capuchin order. It is a magnificent Moorish style structure with formal courtyards with fountains, forty foot painted coffered ceilings in the main former church part and marble pillars holding up the various galleries.
But the real treat was the rooms full of paintings by Bartolome Murillo the 17th century painter from Seville. I only knew his work from one small painting that hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It is a picture of two girls in a window and it has a Vermeer like quality to it.
Here in Seville we were enthralled by dozens of his works. Although most are religious themed it is clear that his models were the people around him, mainly dressed in their contemporary clothing. It was a wonderful find on our last day in Seville.
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