The tradition of painting still lifes stretches back to ancient times. Depictions of food and feasting were popular in Greek and Roman paintings, frescos, and mosaics. The genre was revived with aplomb and flourished in the Netherlands during the early 17th century, before spreading to other countries including Spain, Italy, and France.
Within this genre are a number of still life subcategories: flowers, man-made items, luxurious goods reflecting prosperity and trade, humble everyday objects, memento mori, as well as fruit scenes. Some still lifes are allegorical and philosophical, while others are simply to be appreciated for their surfaces.
Meléndez’s Still Lifes
The greatest 18th-century Spanish still life painter was Luis Meléndez (1716–1780). During his lifetime, he was underappreciated, in part because he was overshadowed by his contemporary Francisco Goya. After he died a pauper, Meléndez’s work fell into obscurity for centuries. Today, his work is attracting scholarly research and critical acclaim.
Meléndez was born in Naples and moved with his family to Spain soon after. His father was a prominent artist and helped found the Royal Academy in Madrid. Meléndez became a student there and a promising career was anticipated. When his father fell out with the Academy, both men were expelled.
The young Meléndez never fully regained his footing. Aspiring to be appointed royal painter, the king denied all of his supplications. A prominent long-term royal commission he earned in 1771 from the Prince of Asturias, later King Charles IV, led to some success in acquiring further patrons. The directive was for him to depict the four seasons by showing every type of food produced in Spain. This was abruptly cancelled in 1776.
Meléndez died four years later, but fortunately his work lives on, especially regarding the 100 or so still lifes he painted during the final two decades of his life. Revealing his range, some are large compositions that include landscape backgrounds, taking inspiration from Neapolitan and Flemish still lifes. Others are of a vertical format and small-scale (Meléndez and his father initially worked as miniaturists after their Academy dismissal). These intimate pictures are of the Spanish still life tradition.
The painting “Still Life With Melon and Pears,” now part of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, may have been part of the royal commission that tasked Meléndez with creating a series of still lifes for the New Cabinet of Natural History in the Royal Palace. Meléndez painted 45 lifelike canvases before the project was stopped. The Museum notes, “Ironically, many were painted at a time when poor harvests had produced severe food shortages. The artist himself had no money to buy food, claiming that his brush was his only asset.”
France’s ‘Great Magician’
Jean Siméon Chardin (1699–1779) was the leading painter of still lifes in France during the 18th century. Unlike Meléndez, Chardin’s work was greatly admired and coveted by collectors, including international bourgeois, nobles, and royals, throughout his career. Since his working practice was labor intensive, he often created multiple versions of a composition if a work was particularly popular.
Denis Diderot, a philosopher, art critic, and encyclopedia publisher of the period, called him the “great magician.” The harmonious colors and compositions of Chardin’s canvases elevate his subjects of everyday items.
Chardin was born in Paris and lived his whole life in the city. His early work focused on scenes of animals and fruit. Then, in the 1730s, he switched gears and became primarily a painter of genre scenes: domestic vignettes inspired by 17th-century Dutch paintings.
The Coveted Strawberry Basket
The 1761 painting “The Basket of Wild Strawberries” is one of Chardin’s most coveted works. The artist created around 120 still lifes in his lifetime; this picture is the only one to feature strawberries in the starring role.
Arranged in a wicker basket, the berries are shown heaped into a pyramidal shape. The strawberry subject is rare in still lifes, with a few leading examples in 17th-century Northern and Spanish Netherlandish art by painters such as Adriaen Coorte and Jacob van Hulsdonck. As with Chardin’s greatest works, the illustrated objects are not the most important aspects of his canvas; rather, it is his investigation into shapes and volumes transmitted with precision. These works also exude a charm, lyricism, and purity, as Chardin ignored the stylistic trends of his day to pursue his own artistic vision.
In March 2022, the picture was sold by the French auction house Artcurial for an astonishing $26.4 million, smashing the work’s high estimate of $16.2 million. It was initially reported that the triumphant bidder was the art dealer Adam Williams, but it was soon revealed that he was acting on behalf of the Fort Worth, Texas institution, the Kimbell Art Museum. Unexpectedly, France’s culture ministry denied an export license for the work, designating it a “national treasure.” This afforded the Louvre several years to raise funds to match the Kimbell Art Museum’s auction price in the hope that the work could stay in the country.
The Spiritual Symbolism of Still Lifes
Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1664) was one of Spain’s most important 17th-century artists, best known for religious narrative paintings. However, he also created a body of work in the still life genre. These canvases, like his other works, have highly spiritual qualities. Zurbarán received prestigious commissions for much of his career, including from religious orders and King Philip IV, but he fell on hard times in his later years and died in poverty.
Zurbarán is most closely associated with Seville. He trained as an artist there and later became the city’s official painter. As the leading painter of Andalusia, he had patrons throughout southern Spain, Madrid, and even in the New World. His work was influenced by the Baroque realism of the Italian painter Caravaggio. Zurbarán, employing light and shadow to great effect, created direct and intense works of the everyday that are transcendent.
The museum writes, “To devout Spanish Catholics in the 17th century, the apparently humble objects portrayed here contained significant religious meaning. The measured placement of the three motifs, for example, would have been instantly understood as an allusion to the Holy Trinity.”
All of the depicted objects in this meditative scene have a skillful three-dimensionality. There are a number of symbolic religious references in the painting. Regarding fruit, the central oranges in a basket are interpreted as a tribute to the Virgin. This is amplified by the orange blossoms, thornless rose, and cup of pure water. In addition, assembled on the table is a pewter plate filled with citrons, a fruit that signifies faithfulness.
Citrons are often confused with lemons, hence the title of this painting, but the artist depicted them with the correct attributes of thicker, bumpier rinds. This aspect is clearly recognizable due to a recent cleaning of the painting undertaken by the museum to remove layers of varnish and retouches. Now, viewers can also see how the artist balanced the composition with a dark background, warm tones visible in the fruit, and the contrasted cooler tones of the vessels.
Meléndez, Chardin, and Zurbarán elevated commonplace produce into captivating, thought provoking, and profound subjects for painting. These three exemplary canvases have a shared subject of fruit, yet each work is distinctly representative of their artist’s respective signature style.
