Still life

By the mid-1640s the monastery commissions that had built Zurbarán's workshop in Seville were thinning out. The city's American trade was shrinking, and he was sending crates of saints across the Atlantic to Lima and Buenos Aires while taking smaller work at home. Pictures like this one belong to that smaller trade, the kind of thing bought for a private room. The peppers on the table had reached Spain from the Indies through Seville's own river quay, and he gives them, and the pottery and the fruit beside them, the flat frontal light and the dark ground he used for his monks. Only a handful of still lifes are given securely to Zurbarán himself, and this is one of them. His son Juan was the specialist of the house in that line of work. This one is dated to about 1644 and hangs in a private collection.