Juan Fernández "el Labrador"

Pictures by him hung in the collection of Charles I of England, and Anne of Austria, queen of France, owned one. The painter is known by a nickname, el Labrador, the farmer, and by very little else. Nobody has found a record of his birth or of his death. He is placed by his work, in Madrid in the 1630s, and by the list of people who bought from him.

Those buyers were reached through the English embassy. Between 1629 and 1635 he supplied Sir Francis Cottington, the English ambassador at the court of Philip IV, and Cottington's secretary Sir Arthur Hopton, who forwarded the still lifes to England, some of them as gifts to the king. One of them, grapes with quinces and nuts, was inventoried in the English royal collection in 1639 and is there still. In February 1635 Hopton was pressing the painter to try flowers, and wrote that if they came out as good as his fruit, his lordship should send for some.

He lived away from the court, in Extremadura by the Prado's account, and his pictures travelled into Madrid without him. He painted few of them, mostly fruit against a dark ground, and only two are accepted as certainly his, one of those a vase signed and dated 1636. Every other attribution, the four bunches of hanging grapes in the Prado included, rests on the style built from that pair.