Exhibit of the week: Luis Meléndez: Master of the Spanish Still Life

National Gallery of Art

Washington, D.C.

Through Aug. 23

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“Piles of plump cucumbers, juicy watermelons, and ripe tomatoes” burst from the walls of the National Gallery’s latest exhibition, said Deborah K. Dietsch in The Washington Times. “Nature’s bounty” was the primary subject of a little-known 18th-century Spanish painter named Luis Meléndez, who helped elevate the “lowly” art of the still life to a level of great skill and polish. “His pictures of raw vegetables, fruits, and meats, arranged around ordinary kitchenware, are much plainer than better-known 17th-century Dutch paintings.” Where the sumptuous scenes in those paintings celebrated the lavish lifestyle of the painters’ rich patrons, Meléndez “meticulously rendered” the everyday staples of a simple peasant existence. In one, a pot of hot chocolate warms a cold winter day, in another “jellied fruit and a bottle of chilled wine symbolizes summer.” He captures the humble beauty of fruit and bread, even as they rot.

But what fascinates isn’t Meléndez’s subject matter so much as his striking style, said Blake Gopnik in The Washington Post. These remarkably vivid and crisply precise images are the 18th-century equivalent of HDTV: “They come to us from the beginning of our modern, technological, scientific times,” and a few were even created for a natural history collection founded by Spain’s future King Charles. Where previous still lifes are pseudo-religious meditations on morality, these are “proto-scientific” documents. The task Meléndez set himself was deceptively simple: “to impassively record how light could strike a collection of things.” Rather than execute his paintings in thick, expressive brush strokes—as Dutch artists did—he rendered “everything with even-handed, even-tempered order, almost like the passes of a scanner’s laser.”

From “the leathery grain of a cantaloupe hide” to “the spongy insides of a broken bread loaf,” Meléndez finds details that make each object seem unique, said Ken Johnson in The New York Times. “Piled oranges and gnarly yellow pears glow as though lighted from within.” One painting that’s primarily focused on a basket of eggs also happens to include “what might be the most beautiful head of cauliflower in the history of art.” Yet it turns out these emblems of “a humble, folksy lifestyle” were not just props. They were the everyday realities of Meléndez’s surprisingly hardscrabble life. Though he painted for the wealthiest patrons of his era, “the greatest still life painter of 18th-century Spain” himself died a pauper.