Still Life with Watermelons and Apples in a Landscape

In 1771 the Prince of Asturias, later Charles IV, asked Meléndez to go on adding to the set of still lifes he was painting for the prince's cabinet of natural history, a collection meant to account for the produce of Spain. This canvas carries that year and it does something he almost never did. In place of the plain dark ground of his kitchen pieces, the melons and apples lie outdoors with a sketched-in landscape behind them, and the arrangement is looser than his usual careful stacking. It is wider too, 84 centimetres across. Both things point to Naples, where he was born and where still life was often set in the open air, whether he remembered it from there or saw Neapolitan pictures later in Madrid. The Prado keeps the canvas in store rather than on a wall. Among the apples he painted fallen seeds, drops of juice and the small rotted patches that fix how ripe each fruit is.