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Luis Meléndez (painter) Spanish, 1715 - 1780 Still Life with Figs and Bread, c. 1770 oil on canvas Overall: 47.6 x 34 cm (18 3/4 x 13 3/8 in.) framed: 65.6 x 49.2 x 4.4 cm (25 13/16 x 19 3/8 x 1 3/4 in.) Patrons' Permanent Fund 2000.6.1 Not on View |
Luis Meléndez was the greatest still-life painter of eighteenth-century Spain, and ranks as one of the greatest painters of the genre in all Europe. Soon after his birth in Naples, his family returned to Spain. His father, Francisco, was a well-known artist instrumental in the long-overdue founding of the Spanish Royal Academy of Fine Arts, provisionally established in 1744. He was named an honorary professor and Luis was admitted as a member with much promise in 1745. However, the father's haughty and difficult character, unfortunately also shared by the son, was their undoing. Francisco printed and circulated a petition denouncing the academy for imagined slights, and Luis personally delivered it to the academy director. Both father and son were dismissed from the powerful institution in 1748, and Luis' career was irrevocably damaged. Denied academy credentials and a prestigious study scholarship in Rome, Luis nevertheless traveled to Naples and Rome on his own. After a few years, he returned to Madrid, assisting his father and brother in painting choir books for the new royal palace.
Much of what is known of Luis Meléndez comes from his own writings. In 1760 his unsuccessful petition to Charles III makes no mention of the still lifes that he had been painting since 1759; the artist's famous letter of 1772 to the future Charles IV, however, centers on this work. Meléndez wrote of painting "the four Seasons of the Year, or more properly, the four Elements, with the aim of composing an amusing cabinet with every species of food produced by the Spanish climate." Meléndez eventually delivered forty-four such canvases to the royal residency in 1773, some just painted, some completed as many as fourteen years earlier. While his canvases were much appreciated by the royal family and private patrons, his difficult personality often worked against him. Meléndez died in poverty in 1780.
Meléndez' Still Life with Figs and Bread contains many elements characteristic of the master's greatest works. His talent for rendering everyday objects with exacting detail is evident, as are his marvelous effects of color and light, which usually comes from the left, and subtle variations of texture. The bone handle of a kitchen knife projects over the edge of a rough, wooden tabletop into the viewer's space. The eye is led in a zigzag line from the plate of green and purple figs to the crusty bread, to a small barrel and wine flask, and finally to a cork keg or cooler. This cork barrel, with wooden staves, a copper-handled container inside, and what seems to be snow or ice showing at the top, appears in several of his still lifes. The dish, whose undulating rim marks it as de castañuela (in the castanet style) from the Talavera region of Spain, is also a familiar object from his kitchen. The smooth bone knife handle, the subtle variations in the skin and hues of the figs (leathery green and iridescent bluish-purple), the crusty bread, the wood grain of the bucket, the rubbery cork, and the shiny glass and copper surfaces show his mastery at portraying contrasting textures through the skillful manipulation of the fluid properties of oil. The vertical format and the combination of ordinary fruits and kitchen utensils placed in close contact with one another suggest a date in the 1760s, before the larger and more ambitious horizontal canvases of the 1770s.
An x-ray done at the time of the painting's acquisition by the National Gallery reveals that the artist made many changes to the composition. Meléndez originally painted a large wedge of cheese at the lower right, large, highlighted reddish berries instead of figs, and a few berries in place of the knife on the left. He also reworked the contour of the bread, the upper contour of the cooler, and the highlights on the flask.
(Text by Gretchen A. Hirschauer, published in the National Gallery of Art exhibition catalogue, Art for the Nation, 2000)