It may be observed that the study of drapery in this school had the effect, to a certain extent, of ennobling the style of the painters; and they were perhaps led to pay attention to this branch of the art, from so often witnessing the fine effect of drapery in the dresses of the religious orders. Sir Joshua Reynolds has somewhere justly observed, that a grand cast of drapery is sometimes of itself sufficient to give an air of dignity to a picture. About 1668, Murillo began the celebrated series in the Hospital de San Jorge, or de la Caridad, whence came several of the pictures now in the possession of Marshal Soult. Among those that remain, the most remarkable and most copious compositions, are the Moses striking the Rock, and the miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. The Prodigal Son, Abraham receiving the Angels, the Pool of Bethesda, and the Deliverance of Peter from Prison are now in Paris; they are all excellent specimens of the master. The Picture of San Juan de Dios bearing an infirm mendicant, is celebrated for its strength of effect, and has been compared, and even attributed, to Spagnoleto. Another composition, now in Madrid, representing Santa Isabel curing the diseased poor, a wonderful specimen of imitation, was the greatest favourite of the series with the common people, when in its original place, owing, perhaps, to the very familiar and disgusting details of the subject; it was generally known by the name of el Tiñoso, from the principal figure, a boy whose sore head the Saint is dressing. The habit of copying to illusion the merest accidents of nature without distinction, naturally led the Spanish painters to all the deformities that can be excused by the epithet “picturesque.” The details of the picture just mentioned would be loathsome, even in words, yet other Sevillian painters went beyond it; and Murillo himself, on seeing a picture in which some dead bodies are painted with repulsive reality by Juan de Valdes, in the church of the Caridad, observed to that artist, that “it could only be looked at while holding the nostrils.”