Boy with a Dog is a 1655-1660 oil on canvas painting by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, now in the Hermitage Museum, in Saint Petersburg, for which it was acquired from the Comte de Choiseul collection in 1772.[1]
The painting represents a ragged, mischievous and cheerful boy, playing with a dog, and which is the thematic model of many paintings by Murillo, children victims of the hardship that in the mid-seventeenth century affected a Seville drowned by the taxes and the competition of Cádiz, after the plague of 1649.[2]