A Peasant Boy leaning on a Sill

The style is that of Murillo's later years. The picture is more modest in scale than the majority of the artist's genre pictures, and approaches the character of a portrait.

It may have been a pendant to a portrait of a girl (formerly in the Jacob Goldschmidt collection, New York) which possibly hung with the painting during the 18th century.

Murillo may have had in mind a literary parallel; in contemporary literature such children are often the main subjects of the narrative.