Still Life with Fruit
Ca. 1660. Oil on canvas. Not on displayA still life with peaches and pears on a pewter plate. Arellano is known fundamentally as an excellent flower painter, although his workshop is known to have produced paintings with other subjects, especially still lifes with fruit, which were subsequently sold in that artist´s own shop, facing the church of San Felipe. This canvas is the only known work in that genre signed by the artist, which makes it of manifest importance.
Compositionally, the sensation of horizontality is broken by the vertical placement of some of the pears. The fact that the planes are not clearly differentiated makes the elements appear to be simply accumulated, and the quality of the fruit skins is not as successfully conveyed as this artist´s well-known flower petals. Still, he manages to generate a harmonious and attuned painting. The fruits´ profiles are defined by dark and sometimes quite thick lines. The background and table are predominantly rendered in ochre tonalities that combine with the grayish-green pears and the yellow with touches of red that convey the peaches´ ripeness. The scene is bathed in light from the upper right corner, which produces shadows among the pieces of fruit and on the left side.