A dish of about two dozen figs, a crusty loaf of bread, a tall, black flask, and two wooden vessels are closely gathered on a wooden table or ledge in this vertical still life painting. At the front right, the figs are either deep purple or pale green. The shallow, pale lavender-gray dish in which they are piled has a narrow, scalloped edge. The round loaf of golden-brown bread, with its split top, sits behind and to our left of the figs. In the lower left corner, next to the figs and closest to us, the handle of a knife projects toward us. Its pewter-colored blade angles back away from us. Beyond the bread is a wide-bellied, black, long-necked bottle with a cork. White reflections of windows out of our view to our left glint on the shiny, inky surface. Next to it, to our right, a small wooden barrel is about the size of an American football. At the back right, the cylindrical neck of a copper vessel pokes out of a pile of pale ice shavings, all within a keg-like bucket. The still life is set against a dark brown background.

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   Luis Meléndez was the greatest still life painter of 18th–century Spain and ranks as one of the greatest painters of the genre in all of Europe. Meléndez's Still Life with Figs and Bread contains many elements characteristic of the master's works. His talent for rendering everyday objects with exacting detail is evident, as are his marvelous effects of color and light, which usually come from the left, and his subtle variations of texture.

   The bone handle of a kitchen knife projects over the edge of a rough, wooden tabletop into the viewer's space. The eye is led in a zigzag line from the plate of green and purple figs to the crusty bread, to a small barrel and wine flask, and finally to a cork keg or cooler. This cork barrel, with wooden staves, a copper–handled container inside, and possibly snow or ice at the top appears in several of his still lifes. The dish, whose undulating rim marks it as de castañuela (in the castanet style) from the Talavera region of Spain, is also a familiar object from his kitchen. The smooth bone knife handle, the subtle variations in the skin and hues of the figs (leathery green and iridescent bluish–purple), the crusty bread, the wood grain of the bucket, the rubbery cork, and the shiny glass and copper surfaces show Meléndez's mastery at portraying contrasting textures through the skillful manipulation of the fluid properties of oil. The vertical format and the combination of ordinary fruits and kitchen utensils placed in close contact with one another suggest a date in the 1760s, before the artist’s larger and more ambitious horizontal canvases of the 1770s.

   An x–ray image done at the time of the painting's acquisition by the National Gallery reveals that Meléndez originally painted a large wedge of cheese at the lower right, large, highlighted reddish berries instead of figs, and a few berries in place of the knife on the left. He also reworked the contour of the bread, the upper contour of the cooler, and the highlights on the flask.

 

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