Bartolomé Esteban Murillo was born in Seville in 1617. He studied with Juan de Castillo, a well established local painter. After marrying Beatriz Cabrera in 1645, with whom he had nine children, he completed his first decorative cycle.

Murillo mainly painted religious subjects in a very realistic style, often using local peasants as models. He greatly admired the Flemish and Genoese seventeenth-century masters as well as sixteenth-century Venetian painting, both of which had an influence on his work. He died on 3rd April 1682 after a fall while painting an altarpiece for the Capuchin Church in Caidiz, Seville.