This is one of a series of twenty paintings dedicated to Saint Francis of Assisi, illustrates the virtues of the saint from his birth to death. Until the Napoleonic invasion the series hung in the cloister of the great convent of Sant Francesc in Barcelona, next to the sea wall. Antoni Viladomat was the most important painter working in Catalonia in the first half of the 18th century. His aesthetic struck a chord in a society bent on regaining its social, economic and cultural dynamism after the shock of the War of the Spanish Succession.