Majorcan school; second half of the XVII century.

Majorcan school; second half of the seventeenth century.
"Still life".
Oil on canvas glued to tablex.
Measurements: 67 x 87 cm; 86 x 105 cm (frame).
The Majorcan school of still lifes shows a strong influence of the Valencian one, although it had its own personality and must have enjoyed a certain importance, given the amount of works that have reached our days.
It developed mainly from the late seventeenth century and during the eighteenth century, from the appearance of the figure of Guillermo Mesquida (1625-1747), which will raise the level of Mallorcan painting. He was the most famous painter of the Balearic Baroque and absolute dominator of the artistic panorama between the end of the XVII and the first half of the XVIII. He was an excellent painter of still lifes, although we do not preserve today not a single one of them that we can attribute to him with absolute certainty. His biographers indicate that he was a disciple in Rome of the Italian Carlos Marata, a painter who had great influence in the development of the still life, since he collaborated with numerous specialists of this genre. Mesquida represented in his works fruits, animals and flowers, and founded in Mallorca a workshop in which numerous works would be made, some of which are still preserved today. His style would have been characterized by a great chromatic richness and a clear ostentatiousness and abundance of fruit and floral elements, traits that would be inherited by his followers of the Mallorcan school. Thanks to Mesquida's influence, the Mallorcan still life painters picked up Italian elements, especially Neapolitan and Roman, always combined with the influence of the Valencian school.