Murillo made this preparatory sketch for one of his many versions of the Immaculate Conception. The free, sketchy handling of this drawing is typical of the artist’s late style and the work is close to one of his paintings, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art, as well as a small picture in a private Spanish collection. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was especially popular in seventeenth-century Spain. Here, this abstract ideal is embodied in the figure of the Virgin standing on a crescent moon.
Drawing by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617-1682), The Immaculate Conception, I, 111