Murillo achieved a balance in his artistic gifts around 1670. The following decade can rightly be called his most brilliant period in which one masterpiece directly followed another. Between 1670 and 1674, he created a large series of pictures for the Caridad Hospital in Seville. Of the original eight pictures, only three remain in their original place because of their size; the remainder were taken to France. Two of these are wide pictures with a large number of figures and are evidence of Murillo’s depiction of actual life, his power of composition and his ability to arrange a large crowd of people around a focal point. One of these two pictures, known in Spain as La Sed (“the thirst”), depicts the miracle of Moses drawing water from a stone in the desert. The other shows the miracle of Christ in the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. Just as Murillo in these pictures showed the pangs of thirst and hunger, in the same way in the third of this series he showed the figures of the sick and crippled being cared for by St. Elizabeth. Moreover, a third series of approximately twenty images were painted by Murillo in 1767 for the Capuchin Monastery in Seville.
Like Velázquez, Murillo died at the height of his fame. He fell from the painting platform during the creation of an altarpiece in the Capuchin Church in Cadiz. He did not recover from this fall and died on April 3, 1682.
Only two of his followers are especially noteworthy because they carried on the line of Spanish realism forged by the two great masters while simultaneously nursing Murillo’s mysticism and religious lyricism. These are Francisco de Zurbarán and Alonso Cano.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Spanish painting took a new upswing with the painter, draughtsman, engraver and lithographer Francisco de Goya y Lucientes. He was active in all areas of painting, frescoes, altarpieces and portraits on a large scale. He also produced drafts for tapestries and applied himself to genre pictures from the life of the people. He did not disguise his views in his satirical, sharply pointed engravings, showing what he thought of Court society and of the religious hypocrisy of the time. He created such genre pieces as The Milkmaid, and portraits and etchings such as Spanish Men and Women. The etchings were disseminated far beyond the borders of Spain.
Goya’s art was of great importance in the development of Impressionism, and inspired such extraordinary painters as Édouard Manet. Manet’s Olympia (1863), Balcony (about 1868) and also Bullfight (1865-1866) clearly show the influence of Goya.
Goya had no successors in Spain; his importance only came to light in the second half of the nineteenth century due to French authors. He lived in Bordeaux from 1624 until his death; he was certainly safer here out of the reach of the Inquisition than at the Spanish Court.