This still life is one of the forty-four such painting which Meléndez painted for the natural history cabinet of Charles Prince of Asturias. The artist had conceived this vast visual natural history of the flora and fauna of Spain in still-life paintings as the greatest work of his career. The project was curtailed by the prince in 1777, however, due to the large number of pictures already completed and their tenuous link with the ostensible scientific rationale of the project. Indeed, many of the works for the series are virtually indistinguishable from Meléndez´s still lifes for other clients. The painting is an outstanding example of the sense of compositional harmony characteristic of Meléndez´s still lifes. In fact, he produced some of his best compositions in such small canvases in a portrait format, which he capitalized on the lack of lateral space to emphasize fictive depth and articulated this by means of the strategic placement of volumetric objects through a succession of receding pictorial planes. The large, swelling forms of two watermelons occupy the deepest plane of the picture, closing off the background and appearing to push forward the other elements. The sweetmeat boxes are projected in playful perspective around the honey-jar and the group of oranges articulates the foremost plane of the table top. A logical chromatic arrangement underlines the formal structure of the composition; the white body of the undecorated honey-jar marks the spatial centre of the arrangement, warm-coloured fruit is placed in the foreground, and the cold green of melon skins dictates their relegation to the distance. Meléndez made a slight adjustment to the upper contour of the topmost orange. Such alterations to the proportions of objects are frequently to be seen in his still lifes and track his search for harmory, drama and potency in their pictorial relations. This interest in the “abstract” formal value of objects in compositions brings him in line with the aesthetic interests of some artists of the early twentieth century. Despite this, Meléndez was committed to a convincing naturalistic representation of the things before him, as was traditional in still-life painting. In adding his signature as if scorched into the end of the sweetmeat box, he thus identified his authorship with the representation of the illusion of reality. A similar idea can be seen to inform his other still life in the exhibition, as well as those of earlier Spanish artists (Texto extractado de Cherry, Peter, In the presence of things: four centuries of European still-life painting, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2010, p. 250).

In the presence of things. Four centuries of European still life paintings, Lisboa, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2010, p.250-251,69-117