Murillo was a painter in seventeenth-century Spain who began portraying young beggars, which he himself was as a child, in consolatory poses… These paintings gave rise to a long series of genre paintings, modest imitations and later also cheap reproductions, which were appreciated by people with a humble status in decorating their homes. Those purchases, made with a few pennies, conveyed all the meaning of an artistic redemption that represented the condition of the lower classes. Murillo’s tableau vivant provides us with an anthology of beggar boys and of ways in which to reach out to ask for something, when all you have is yourself, knowing that what you receive is only a leftover of what you are excluded from, or perhaps a deliberate distance from obscene wealth.

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