The Infant Christ as the Good Shepherd

Bought by the Gallery’s founders as a work by Murillo, this painting was once thought to be an oil sketch or a smaller autograph version of the original painting, which was famous in France throughout the eighteenth century. However, pigment analysis has proven that the colour Prussian Blue was used in the sky area, a pigment not invented until 1706. The present painting is therefore an eighteenth-century copy, possibly by a French artist such as Jean-Alexis Grimou (1678-1733), whose full-size copy after the original was in England in the eighteenth century and copied by Gainsborough.