Saint Thomas of Villanueva giving alms to the poor

Saint Thomas of Villanueva, the Archbishop of Valencia who died in 1555 and was canonized in 1658, became one of Murillo's most important subjects — he painted the saint's charity at least four times across his career. The Seville painter's attraction to Thomas was practical as well as pious: the saint's famous generosity to the poor provided a subject that combined religious exemplar with the kind of low-life genre figures Murillo excelled at — barefoot beggars, ragged children, the laboring poor of Seville's streets painted with the same dignity Velázquez reserved for court sitters. The Seville version of this composition was painted for the Augustinian convent of La Merced and dates to the mid-1660s, when Murillo's reputation was at its height.

The architectural setting — a colonnade or church doorway — frames the saint in the center, with groups of supplicants rendered below and to the sides with Murillo's characteristic warm naturalism. The saint's white robes provide a luminous focal point, and the beggars' faces and hands are painted with the psychological individuality that distinguishes Murillo's figure work.