Murillo House

Brief Information

The Murillo House is important not for its size, but for its changing roles: it is the house where Bartolomé Esteban Murillo lived in his final years, then an attempt to restore the house’s 17th-century appearance, and now an administrative site already connected with flamenco. In one building, the memory of the painter, a museum reconstruction, and a modern cultural service of Andalusia have come together.

The house museum was created in 1972 and opened in 1982, on the tercentenary of Murillo’s death. Later, most of the building became offices of the Andalusian Council of Culture, while the museum section was reduced to a small space for temporary exhibitions. Therefore, it is better to read this place not as a preserved “artist’s house” in the pure sense, but as a building that has been adapted several times to different ways of preserving and presenting culture.

What to notice right away

It is worth comparing three material clues. The first is the two-story structure with a central courtyard on columns: it sets the domestic scale of the building, the very reason people tried to restore the atmosphere of an earlier century here. The second is the tilework from 1590, brought from the rectorate of the University of Seville. It is important not as decoration in itself, but as an insertion of older material through which the museum strengthened the feeling of a historical interior.

The third clue is the recreated domestic areas: the bedroom, living room, kitchen, and other elements of a house from that period. They show that the museum spoke not only about the artist through paintings from the Museum of Fine Arts of Seville, but also through the organization of the dwelling. Later, most of the building became offices, and this contrast changes the way one sees the house: before us is not a frozen memorial setting, but a place where the museum reconstruction has remained only one layer of use.