Four Bunches of Hanging Grapes

Four bunches of grapes hang on cords against black, and that is the entire picture. No table, no plate, no jug, no cloth. Three varieties can be told apart, each caught at a different point of ripening, and the painter modelled every single grape separately rather than repeating one shape across a bunch.

He is known by a nickname, el Labrador, the farmer, and he worked away from Madrid. The English diplomats at the court of Philip IV bought from him between 1629 and 1635 and sent his fruit home to Charles I, which is most of the reason his name survived at all. Beyond that the record is thin. Only two paintings are accepted as certainly his, one of them a vase of flowers signed and dated 1636, and every other attribution, this canvas included, rests on the manner built up from that pair.

The Prado owns a second, closely related picture of four bunches, listed as this one's companion. Both came out of a Madrid private collection and reached the museum in 2006, handed over by a bank in settlement of a tax debt.