The Soup Kitchen

This painting highlights the virtue of charity and good deeds, typical of Spanish religious art of the seventeenth century. A sitting woman ladles out soup from a large jar, wrapped in a white cloth inside a wicker basket to keep warm. The figures waiting in line represent disfavored and marginalized types, among them a greying man with a traveler's hat, an elder walking with a crutch, and a widow, suggested by her black habit and hair covering. The boy in ragged clothes is probably an orphan.