Still Life with Figs

On the back of this small canvas, burned into the wooden stretcher, is a cipher under a ducal crown. It belonged to the Infante Sebastián Gabriel de Borbón, a Spanish prince and great-nephew of King Charles IV. When Spain split into civil war over the succession in the 1830s, he fought for the Carlists, who wanted Don Carlos, brother of the late king, on the throne. In 1835 the liberal government confiscated his property, and this picture was deposited in the Museo de la Trinidad in Madrid. He got it back in 1861 and took his collection with him into exile at Pau, in the southwest of France, where he died.

Later it belonged to the Belgian painter Émile Wauters, who left it to the Louvre, and it arrived in 1934. On the front the story is simpler, a plate of green figs, a round loaf, a bottle and a wicker basket, and Meléndez wrote his initials on the basket.