The Young Beggar
c. 1645–1650 · Oil on canvas · Musée du Louvre, Paris
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About this work
- Artist
- Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–1682)
- Year
- c. 1645–1650
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Original size
- 134 × 100 cm
- Collection
- Musée du Louvre, Paris
- Movement
- Baroque
A barefoot boy in torn clothes sits on a mat in a shaft of sunlight picking lice from his shirt, a jug, a basket and the remains of a meal of shrimps and apples beside him on the floor. Murillo painted it in Seville around 1645 to 1650, his first known picture of a street child, in a city where plague and hardship had left many children to fend for themselves; he had been orphaned young himself. The strong light and shadow show how much the followers of Caravaggio had taught him. Louis XVI bought the canvas in 1782 through the dealer Lebrun, and it was shown at the opening of the Louvre museum in 1793. In the nineteenth century it was a favourite of copyists, with seventy-seven registered at the Louvre between 1851 and 1853 alone, and Cézanne, Fantin-Latour and Carpeaux all drew on it. It hangs in the Denon wing of the Louvre.
This print reproduces the whole work, uncropped, from a high-resolution scan of the original. The original is in the public domain.
Details & materials
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About this design
The Madten promise
An exhibition poster
The same artwork as a gallery exhibition poster — title, artist & date typeset beneath the image on a soft ground.














