Murillo was thus one of the last sincerely religious painters--a class which, "after a few pale rays of fading sanctity from Guido, and brown gleams of gipsy Madonnahood from Murillo, came utterly to an end" (_Modern Painters_, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. iv. § 4). But it was "_gipsy_ Madonnahood": there is an entire want of elevation in his religious types, and the peasants whom he painted as beggars or flower-girls he painted also as angels or Virgins. This mingling of the common with the religious alike in subject and treatment was no doubt a principal reason of his great popularity in his own country.[52] His vulgarity of treatment in his favourite beggar subjects is best seen in the Dulwich Gallery; of his religious style, the pictures here are characteristic examples. There is a certain "sweetness" and sentimentality about them which often makes them immensely popular. The French in particular are subject to a _furore_ for Murillo, his "Immaculate Conception," now in the Louvre, having been bought in 1852 for £23,440--the largest sum ever given up to that time for a single picture.[53] With children, too, Murillo is nearly always a great favourite. A maturer taste, however, finds the sentiment of Murillo overcharged, and the sweetness of expression an insufficient substitute for elevation of character. "His drawing," says Ruskin, "is free and not ungraceful, but most imperfect and slurred to give a melting quality of colour. That colour is agreeable because it has no force or severity; but it is morbid, sunless, and untrue. His expression is sweet, but shallow; his models amiable, but vulgar and mindless; his chiaroscuro commonplace, opaque, and conventional; and yet all this is so agreeably combined, and animated by a species of wax-work life, that it is sure to catch everybody who has not either very high feeling or strong love of truth, and to keep them from obtaining either" (Letter to Dean Liddell, given in the _Memoir_ by H. L. Thompson, p, 224.)[54] "Murillo," says a more appreciative critic, "who assimilated least of foreign elements, had become the most international of all Spanish painters; for he possessed the art of winning the favour of all, the gift of a language intelligible to all times and peoples, to all classes and even to aliens of his faith" (Justi: _Velazquez and his Times_, p. 236). One charm his pictures have which no criticism is likely to take away: they are all stamped with the artist's individuality; there is never any mistaking a Murillo.