Artwork
Still Life with Herrings Chives Garlic and Kitchen Utensils
Still Life with Herrings Chives Garlic and Kitchen Utensils is an oil painting by the Rococo painting artist Luis Egidio Meléndez. It dates from 1750 and is held in the collection of the Museo del Prado. Luis Egidio Meléndaz painted this oil on canvas around 1750.
About this work
Subject & Meaning
These objects are arranged on a wooden table against a brown background, emphasizing the artist's focus on the textural variety of everyday materials.
The work depicts a rustic kitchen arrangement featuring smoked herrings, a bundle of fresh green onions (cébettes), a large round loaf of bread, and various ceramic and metal vessels. Central to the composition are a brown ceramic jug from Talavera de la Reina, decorated with a rose motif, and an oil pitcher known as an alcuza, alongside a dark vinegar bottle and a wicker basket. These objects are arranged on a wooden table against a brown background, emphasizing the artist's focus on the textural variety of everyday materials.
The painting is part of a specific series created for the cabinet of natural history of the Prince of Asturias, intended to document Spanish culinary and domestic items with a veristic style.
Technique & Style
The painting is executed in oil on canvas, measuring 50.3 cm in height and 36.7 cm in width. Meléndez employs a restrained, naturalistic handling, emphasizing tactile realism through subtle shifts in light and shadow across the depicted surfaces.
Formal qualities center on a shallow, planar arrangement, with objects aligned along a wooden tabletop against a neutral, brownish ground. The composition balances rough-textured herring skins and fresh chives in the foreground with a glazed ceramic pitcher and a woven basket in the mid- and background. A muted, earth-toned palette of ochres, browns, and off-whites reinforces the genre’s humble subject while allowing selective highlights to define form and volume.
History & Provenance
Luis Egidio Meléndez created Still Life with Herrings, Chives, Garlic, and Kitchen Utensils as part of a series of still lifes commissioned for the natural history cabinet of the Prince of Asturias, the future Charles IV of Spain. While internal records cite a date of 1750, other sources place the work's creation between 1760 and 1770. The painting originally belonged to the collection of Ferdinand VII of Spain before entering the holdings of the Museo del Prado, where it is kept under inventory number 907. The work is currently associated with the Royal Palace of Aranjuez.
The painting is held in the collection of the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, with the inventory number 907.
It was included in several notable exhibitions: Paris in 1979 as part of L’Art européen à la cour d’Espagne au XVIIIe siècle; Dublin from June to September 2004 in Luis Meléndez; Madrid from June to September 2006 in Picasso. Tradición y Vanguardia; and New York from November 2006 to March 2007 in From El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth and History.
Context
Still Life with Herrings, Chives, Garlic and Kitchen Utensils is one of the late still lifes Meléndez produced for the Prince of Asturias’s natural history cabinet at Aranjuez, aligning with the artist’s mature phase aimed at documenting quotidian Spanish objects with analytical precision. Its restrained palette and textural fidelity exemplify Meléndez’s contribution to eighteenth‑century Spanish bodegón painting, which shifted from Baroque opulence toward empirical observation under Enlightenment patronage.
The work entered the Prado’s holdings from the Spanish royal collection, reflecting its status as part of a commissioned series rather than a speculative market piece. Exhibitions in Paris (1979), Dublin (2004), Madrid (2006), and New York (2006–07) consolidated its recognition within broader narratives of European tradition and Spanish artistic identity during the late ancien régime.
Overview
Luis Egidio Meléndaz painted this oil on canvas around 1750. The composition presents a modest kitchen tableau: several herrings, fresh chives, cloves of garlic, a loaf of bread, a clay jug with a white lid, a metal pitcher, a basket and a dark bottle, all set on a wooden table against a deep, shadowed background.
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Artist & collection
Artist
Luis Egidio Meléndez (1716–1780) was a Spanish painter. Though he received little acclaim during his lifetime and died in poverty, Meléndez is recognized as one of the greatest Spanish still-life painters of the 18th…
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