What is Francisco de Zurbarán's most famous painting?

Browse ByMuseum's guide to Francisco de Zurbarán's most famous paintings and hand-painted oil reproductions.

Can I buy a hand-painted reproduction of a Francisco de Zurbarán painting?

Yes. ByMuseum offers hand-painted oil reproductions on real canvas, not prints.

Francisco de Zurbarán Paintings: Most Famous Works

Who was Francisco de Zurbarán?

Francisco de Zurbarán was born in 1598 in Fuente de Cantos, a small town in Extremadura in western Spain, the son of a shopkeeper. At sixteen he was sent to Seville, then the richest city in Spain and the port for all trade with the Americas, to train as a painter. He never really left the world of that city: its churches, its monasteries and its religious orders gave him almost all of his work.

His first great chance came in 1626, when the Dominicans of San Pablo el Real in Seville commissioned twenty-one paintings from him in eight months. Two years later the Mercedarians asked him for a series on the life of their founder, and for them he painted Saint Serapion, the martyr hanging by his wrists in a white habit, one of the most powerful images of the Spanish Baroque. In 1629 the city council of Seville invited him to settle there as its own painter. When the local painters' guild, led by Alonso Cano, demanded that he first pass its examination, he refused, and the city backed him.

Through the 1630s he was the leading painter in Seville. In 1631 he finished the huge Apotheosis of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and in 1634 he went to Madrid to paint the Labours of Hercules and the Defence of Cádiz for the Hall of Realms in the new Buen Retiro palace, where his friend from Seville, Diego Velázquez, was court painter. Back in Andalusia he painted his most famous cycles, for the Carthusians of Jerez and for the Hieronymite monks of Guadalupe, whose sacristy still holds his paintings where he hung them. His workshop also shipped large numbers of saints and series of paintings to the churches of Spanish America.

His private life was marked by loss. He married three times and outlived two wives, and his son Juan, a gifted still life painter, died in the plague of 1649. In the same years taste in Seville turned towards the softer, sweeter style of the young Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and commissions slowed. In 1658 Zurbarán moved to Madrid, still working, and he died there on 27 August 1664.

For two centuries he was little known outside Spain. Today he is admired as one of the great painters of the Spanish Golden Age, and often called the Spanish Caravaggio: the painter of monks in white, of silent saints, and of a handful of still lifes that are among the most perfect ever painted.

What defines Francisco de Zurbarán style

The first thing anyone notices in a Zurbarán is the dark. His figures stand against plain, deep backgrounds, lit by a strong light from one side, so that they seem to step out of the shadow towards you. He learned this way of painting, called tenebrism, from the example of Caravaggio, whose style had reached Seville through prints, copies and Spanish painters returning from Italy. But Zurbarán uses it differently. In Caravaggio the light is dramatic and the scene is in motion. In Zurbarán everything is still.

His figures have an almost sculptural weight. Seville was a city of painted wooden statues, made for churches and processions, and Zurbarán's saints often look as solid as those carvings, with simple poses, few gestures and clear outlines. He usually paints one figure, or a few, and leaves out everything that is not needed. The effect is quiet and concentrated, closer to prayer than to theatre.

He is above all a painter of cloth. The white habits of Carthusian and Mercedarian monks were one of his specialities, and no painter of his time made so many shades out of white: cream, grey, blue and silver in the folds of a single robe. His female saints, by contrast, wear the silks, brocades and jewels of fashionable ladies in Seville, painted with the same patient precision, so that they look like portraits of real women holding the symbols of their martyrdom.

The same concentration gives his still lifes their power. In Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose, or in the bound lamb of Agnus Dei, a few ordinary things are lined up on a ledge against darkness and lit as carefully as a saint. Nothing happens, and yet the objects seem almost sacred. These pictures have been admired by modern artists as much as by collectors of old masters.

His weaknesses are part of his character. Crowded scenes and deep perspective were not his strength, and in large compositions the figures can seem placed side by side rather than arranged in space. But in a single figure, a white habit or a lemon on a plate, nobody in seventeenth-century Spain painted with more calm or more intensity.