The fruit in the foreground is projected with unrivaled expressive force—a superb rendering of its attractive freshness. The works sober composition is executed in a manner that brings out its author’s virtuosity: solid drawing, rich colors and a perfectionist realism that extends to even the smallest details. The arrangement of these splendid fruits is orderly and clear, eschewing a facile decorativeness in favor of a concretion heightened by the fine contrast of light and shadows. Though generally fond of neutral backgrounds, Meléndez opts for a summary landscape in this work, making it a rare and original image that recalls the landscapes in his illustrations of the beautiful pages of the Royal Chapel’s choir books.

The outdoor setting and the peculiar overall construction recall Neapolitan still lifes, which this artist may have seen in Italy or as a result of his familiarity with works from that school in Madrid. The fleshy and juice-filled watermelons are rendered with reddish bases heightened by touches of whites, pinks, yellows and reds whose different mixtures and degrees of impasto create a variety of nuances in their endocarp, from the denser flesh to the moistest parts whose transparent drops of juice drip on the ground. The passage between the two apples in the immediate foreground is very delicate indeed, with the fallen seeds, drops of juice and tiny bits of watermelon flesh. And the artist’s rendering of the apples is no less meticulous. His fine eye leads him to specify the smallest details—the tiny rotted spots, the highlights and their ripeness—with small touches of vermillion, red lacquer and various earth tones that mix and combine with the yellow color of their skin. At the same time, he locates each on in the pictorial space by its degree of treatment and how the skin is finished.

This canvas is paired with another painting of almost exactly the same size—P922—with which it shares the subject of fruit with a landscape in the background, and thus no other spatial reference than Nature itself. Watermelons, cut or whole, appear in various other works by this artist in Spanish and foreign collections. These works stand out for the grace and novelty of their peculiar structure, which is very different from the solid works from the seventh decade of the century. The play of opposing lines and the ease with which they are laid out constitute a dynamic not at all frequent in Meléndez’s production. Indeed, these images seem to be the result of a more joyous and relaxed esthetic, far from the traditional Spanish sobriety associated with Siglo de Oro artworks. An X-ray image of this painting shows that the canvas has been reused, with a confused underlying composition that seems to consist of large-leafed plants (Text from Luna, J. J. : El bodegón español en el Prado. De Van der Hamen a Goya, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2008, p. 122).