Luis Meléndez

Meléndez did not set out to be a still life painter. Born to a family of artists in the Spanish dominion of Naples and settling in Madrid a year later, Meléndez was assistant to Louis-Michel van Loo, court painter to King Philip V, between 1737–42. One of his most celebrated works is the Self-Portrait (Musée du Louvre, Paris) painted in 1746 when he was a young student at the newly founded Royal Academy of Painting in Madrid where his father was director of painting. It is evident from this work that Meléndez had aspirations to paint academic history painting. However, he and his father were separately expelled in 1748. For the next four years, Meléndez went to Italy, where he would have among other things encountered a flourishing school of still life painting, especially in Naples where he was granted an audience with the future King Charles III of Spain.

Meléndez returned to Madrid in 1753 and worked alongside his father painting miniatures on vellum for the Royal Chapel but he must have already decided to supplement his income painting still lifes. His earliest extant example is dated 1759, a horizontal Still Life with Apples, Boxes of Sweetmeats, Cask and Jug (Museo del Prado, Madrid), and seems to have been a work painted on spec for the Prince of Asturias. In 1771 Meléndez was commissioned by María Luisa de Parma, Princess of Asturias, to paint an extensive series of still lifes for the prince’s new Cabinet of Natural History.  Intended to document  ‘every specifies of food produced by the Spanish climate’, they can be interpreted as an Enlightenment study of Natural History of Spain. By 1776, forty-four paintings were completed in this series, when it was prematurely terminated due to payment disputes. They adorned the Casita del Principe in the Escorial, then moved to the royal palace at Aranjuez in the 19^th century (now in the Museo del Prado and other Spanish museums). These still lifes may have had an impact on Francisco Goya, who would have been familiar with this series and painted a dozen still life paintings late in life.

Meléndez left behind a unique and immediately recognizable oeuvre, almost entirely of still lifes. They are rarely large (the biggest measures 105 x 153.7 cm) and are evenly divided between horizontal and vertical formats. A few of the larger examples include landscape details, reflecting the influence of Flemish and Neapolitan still lifes, whereas the smaller vertical canvases tend to keep the intensely focused dark background. The latter are his most distinctive and dramatic type of composition, where he plays with void and occupied space. Somewhat unique to his practice is his frequent adaptation of horizontal arrangements into vertical ones. Meléndez spent much of his life in poverty and died poor.

His distinctive approach to still life paintings and independent spirit appeals to our modern sensibility, especially since the still life genre, led by artists like Paul Cézanne, Georges Braque and Giorgio Morandi, became a site of avant-garde experimentations.