One of the most important Spanish artists of the eighteenth century, Luis Meléndez painted over 100 still lifes throughout his career. The present painting, however, is one of only six large-scale still lifes that are set within outdoor settings. With its pile of just ripening artichokes, scattered pea stems and glowing red tomatoes artfully arranged within a landscape, the subject is ordinary fare, not food for a banquet, set directly on the ground before a group of dark trees, with a small hilly landscape painted beyond to the right. Even with its grand size and dramatic landscape, the painting displays the graceful simplicity that characterizes Meléndez's work and is so appealing to the modern viewer, raised on the beautifully constructed compositions of Cézanne and Matisse.

Meléndez came from a family of artists. His father, Francesco Antonio Meléndez (1682-1758), was a royal painter trained in Madrid; upon completing his studies in 1699, he moved to Italy and traveled throughout the country before settling in Naples. It was there that he met and married Maria Josefa de Durazo y Santo Padre Barrille y Rodriguez (c. 1685-1751) and bore three children, the second of which was Luis. The family left Naples and returned to Spain in 1717. Francesco Antonio developed a successful career as a miniature court painter in Madrid and was named as the first Master Director of Painting of the Provisional Academy of Arts, which began in 1744.
Luis Meléndez originally set out to be a figure painter and studied under the French royal portraitist Louis-Michel Van Loo while he was in Madrid. Perhaps with his father’s influence, in 1744 he left van Loo’s studio to become one of the first students of the Provisional Academy. While a student there he completed a Self-portrait (fig. 1) in 1746 which shows him proudly displaying a black chalk drawing of a muscular nude figure, exhibiting his great ambitions as a young artist. Unfortunately, his dreams of being an academic figure painter were foiled when Meléndez and his father were expelled from the Provisional Academy of Arts in 1748 due to souring relations with the leadership, an ironic situation as Francesco Antonio had helped to found the Academy. Thus the young Meléndez became a miniature painter, and also turned to what was then considered the minor genre of still life.

Still life painting in Spain had virtually disappeared between the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries. What interest there was in the subject was satisfied by importing pictures and somet.mes s the artists themselves from Italy. From 1748, the year he left the Academy, to 1752, Meléndez lived in Rome and Naples, where he was exposed to contemporary still lifes and well as the work of the famous artists of the preceding century. The Neapolitan Giacomo Nani (1698-1770), whose still lifes show a similar simplicity and concentration on mundane food stuffs and table ware, is often cited as an influence on him. The earliest dated still lifes by Meléndez are from 1759 and 1760, once he had returned to Madrid, though their quality is so high it is hard to believe this was his first foray into the subject matter.

In the end, Meléndez's originality and skill set him apart from his contemporaries in Spain and Italy. Despite the humble nature of the objects portrayed, his still lifes have a remarkable grandeur and monumentality. Here in the Still Life of Artichokes and Tomatoes in a Landscape, as in most of his paintings, he chooses a low vantage point and sets the objects very close to the picture plane. He arranges the artichokes carefully on top of one another, mixing in other greens to vary the textures; two tomatoes that are just turning red are snugly placed into the pile. A few small pears and some pea pods are scattered in front of the pile and four large, juicy tomatoes balance the composition in the right foreground. The exact placement of the objects is crucial and carefully calibrated. Melendez paints the various vegetables and fruits from every direction, so we can see the wonderful, sculptural curves and sharp ridges of the artichokes from all sides, and how the segments of the tomatoes bulge out and then curve back in toward the stems. Even the pears, which otherwise would be overlooked, are shown in various positions, standing up elegantly as well as toppled over and seen from the bottom, with delicate stems holding them up. He differentiates the smooth surfaces of the tomatoes and pears from the tough green leaves of the artichokes and the crinkling, stiff leaves of the greens, and while everything appears to be just piled together, it is all carefully drawn out in a distinct diagonal composition, pulling the viewer’s eye from the top of the green leafs down to the curving lines of the swollen tomatoes.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of Meléndez’s late career was his extensive still life series commissioned by the Prince of Asturias for his New Cabinet of Natural History. The extensive and important group comprised of forty-four still lifes, today divided between the Museo Nacional del Prado, the Patrimonio Nacional, and the Museo Nacional de Escultura; the dated works in the group range from 1759 to 1774, and there are documents dating the delivery of the works to the Prince beginning in 1771 and continuing for multiple years, with a final payment made on 25 February 1777 (and a documented dispute over the payments with ultimately ended the relationship). Included in this group are four large-scale still lifes set into landscapes, with dimensions almost identical to the Shickman painting, and similar diagonal compositional schemes (fig. 2).¹ These four works, each of which features a dominant fruit that is grown in Spain (cantaloupe, watermelon, pomegranate, and grapes), are dated between 1771-1774 and, given the similarities to the Shickman picture, it is generally acknowledged that the present work must also date from this t.mes . Indeed, it has also been suggested that the Shickman picture could have been painted as part of the commission for the Prince, though ultimately not delivered given the payment dispute. Not only is the Shickman picture composed in a similar manner and on the same size canvas, but the artichoke is also an important product of the Iberian Peninsula and the Spanish-ruled regions of Southern Italy.²

Another work by Meléndez which features a similar pile of artichokes and pea shoots, set in a lighter and more sparse landscape without the tomatoes, is in a private collects ion (fig. 3). In this instance, he has varied the landscape and supporting elements enough that they certainly stand out as separate paintings completed for individual clients, and though it has similar dimensions to the Shickman painting and the four works painted for the Prince of Asturias, it does not feature the same dark, diagonal landscape scheme which is repeated in the other five works of this scale.

1 See Cherry 2006, cat. nos. 33-36, reproduced pp. 415-418.
² See Kasl and Stratton 1997, p. 269.