Still-Life with Melon and Pears

Luis Egidio Mel�ndez is the most important Spanish still-life painter of the 18th century. He saw his bodegones as part of an ambitious project. In a petition addressed to King Charles III in 1772, he wrote that he was planning a series of paintings for a cabinet that would illustrate all the different foodstuffs produced by the Spanish climate over the four seasons in the four elements. Up to this point he had only finished those showing the fruits of the earth. He had the means neither to continue the project, however, nor indeed to feed himself.

It seems somewhat unlikely that Mel�ndez planned his still-lifes as a coherent programme right from the outset; rather, he must have arrived at this idea as time went by and he found himself in possession of a sizeable stock of unsold pictures of food and household utensils. During these years he supplied 44 still-lifes to Prince Carlos of Asturia, the later King Charles IV. The paintings went first to the newly built Casita del Pr�ncipe, a country villa near the Escorial de Abajo. Around 1800 they hung in the dining room in the royal palace in Aranjuez.