According to Nani himself, this still life depicts: a “rest during the hunt with a hat on the ground” and the hunter’s bagged game. The dead animals are shown in different states: the hare still bleeding, the partridge already skinned and one of the three partridges plucked. Together, the birds present a realistic vision, albeit one subordinated to the decorative nature of the composition. This canvas was commissioned by the heir to the throne, the future Charles IV, for the Royal Palace in Madrid.

This painting and its companion (P000264) are documented in an invoice which Nani submitted for payment to the prince in December 1786. They belong to a long-standing type of game still life depicting trophies of the hunt. The pieces of game are here nonchalantly piled upon a river bank, in a landscape notable for its sparkling luminosity. The blood dripping from the hare, as can also be seen in the hunting piece of Goya, suggests a fresh kill. Some of the birds have already been plucked, doubtless for an outdoors meal “on the hoof”. Nani evidently knew his game and his invoice carefully itemized the subject matter. He called one of the paintings “the huntsman´s rest”, referring to the black hat of the hunter left on the ground, along with a plucked quail, a tied hare, two partridge with feathers and another plucked, and a landscape view. The other was said to depict a duck with a partridge tied to a tree, two quails, one of them plucked, with a landscape view. Nani referred to these types of still lifes as “historiadas”, since a narrative element was implied by the accoutrements of the hunt included in the composition and which only implied the presence of human figures he was otherwise ill equipped to paint. The Neapolitan artist Mariano Nani, son of the still-life painter Giacomo Nani (1698-1770), had come to Madrid with King Charles III (r.1759-88) to paint at the Buen Retiro porcelain factory. He also painted still lifes for the open market and, in 1764, was awarded the title of academician in the speciality of the still-life painting for a presentation piece, Still Life with Fruit, Sheep, Hare, Game Birds and Cat (Madrid, Real Academia de San Fernando) which was an official demonstration of his representational abilities in a wide range of subject matters, including live animals.

Nani attracted the attention of Charles Prince of Asturias, who had commissioned Meléndez´s extensive series of still lifes on the theme of the natural history of Spain, and became provider of still life for the Prince after the death of the latter. The key to Nani´s success here was his specialization in hunting subjects and his skill at painting dogs and live animals, which appealed greatly to a patron who avidly pursued field sports. It is likely that a number of his pictures commemorated actual pieces of game killed by his patron. Moreover, Nani emulated Flemish painters of the seventeenth century, increasingly admired in court circles for the verisimilitude with which they depicted animal´s skins. He seems to have been particularly taken by the painting of Jan Fyt, which he knew in the royal collection and other collections in Madrid. Nani evokes fur and feathers through densely layered, hatched brushwork and scoring with handle of the brush; stumping is used to give the puckered effect of the skin of plucked birds (Texto extractado de Cherry, Peter, In the presence of things: four centuries of European still-life painting, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2010, p. 232).

In the presence of things: four centuries of European still-life painting, Lisbon, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2010, p.232-233