A profusion of cooking utensils and hearty meats -game birds fresh from the hunt and not yet dressed, a recently-killed lamb, a calf’s head, and other cuts- are laid out on a work surface, as if the painter had found them thus in a kitchen, awaiting the preparation of a meal. The apparent disorderly informality of the painting’s composition gives it an air of immediacy and lifelikeness, but is in fact the product of Cerezo’s careful reflection. For example, the impression of homey chaos is created by the painting’s asymmetry and the presence of many diagonal lines - the lamb’s leg, the knife, the wooden spoon, and, at the rear, the black handle of an iron skillet. The elements seem to be arranged haphazardly, but each is in fact carefully placed, so that shifting any one would destroy the general balance of the composition. Although it does not stand out, the small plinths on top of which the oil bottle and the calf’s head rest would have been an unusual architectural feature in a real kitchen; they are probably a clever trick used by the painter in order to build the composition upward. Adding height would allow him to add more objects, which would be impossible if they were all on the same surface.

The vegetables and other foods shown in Spanish still-life paintings of this period are sometimes meant to represent a month or a season, often as part of a series of four or twelve paintings illustrating the cycle of the year. This particular painting is not known to have had any companions, but it does contain several elements that allow us to associate it with a particular season. Generally, lambs were allowed to grow and fatten during the summer months and killed in the autumn, around the same time of the year when the woodcock next to the bread roll would have been hunted. The meal being prepared might be a hearty stew, with different types of meats cooked over a fire with the onions and dried peppers we see in the center of the painting and seasoned with the spices in the twist of paper in the foreground. The salt pork or bacon to the right of and slightly above the lamb’s head was used to add flavor and fat to the dish. This type of cookery is still found in some regions of Spain, as are some of the copper cooking utensils in the painting: the wide, shallow skillet with rings for holding it is very much like the common paellera.

The warm, earthy tones of the picture and the way in which Cerezo handles his paint reveal his admiration for painters of the Venetian school, especially Titian. Venetian paintings of everyday subjects had been popular in Spain since the late sixteenth century, when the work of the Bassanos was imported and imitated. A Neo-Venetian style, whose main practitioner was Juan Carreño de Miranda, was very much in vogue in Madrid when Cerezo arrived there. More specifically, the influence of Antonio Pereda (1611-1678) can be felt in details such as the strong chiaroscuro and the rich impasto of Cerezo’s still-life paintings. The fact is, the connections between the two artists are so close that some confusion has arisen over the authorship of some paintings, and the Kitchen Still-Life, which is considered the work of Cerezo today has in the past been attributed to Pereda (Text drawn from Pérez d´Ors, P.: El Greco to Goya. Masterpieces from the Prado Museum, Museo de Arte de Ponce, 2012, pp. 131-132).