The Afternoon Meal (La Merienda)

Luis Meléndez, the leading Spanish still-life painter of the eighteenth century, worked in Madrid largely unrecognized, yet his bodegones are now counted among the most powerful still lifes in European art. The Afternoon Meal, painted around 1772, belongs to the late period in which Meléndez, heir to the bodegón tradition of Sánchez Cotán and Zurbarán, brought it to a final flowering.