St Francis of Assisi at Prayer

Saint Francis of Assisi at Prayer of around 1645 at the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp belongs to the extraordinary body of work Murillo produced for Seville's Franciscan community — the largest institutional patron of his career and the source of his most sustained artistic development. The Franciscans had been central to Seville's religious and charitable life since the medieval period, and their multiple churches, convents, and hospices required constant supplies of devotional images. Murillo worked for the Franciscans virtually throughout his career, beginning with the thirteen-canvas cycle for the Convent of San Francisco el Grande that established his reputation in 1646. Saint Francis himself — the founder of the mendicant order who combined radical poverty with intense mystical experience — was one of Murillo's most frequently painted subjects, and his treatment always emphasised the saint's interior experience over external signs of penitential suffering. The painting's presence in Antwerp documents the spread of Murillo's work through the Franciscan network connecting Spain to the Habsburg Netherlands.

The kneeling saint is rendered in Murillo's early style with firm modeling and relatively dark tonality, before the development of the vaporous, sfumato technique that would characterize his later religious paintings.