RECENT exhibitions and the publication of Eleanor Tufts's catalogue raisonn of the works of Luis Melkndez have drawn attention to the questions surrounding the centrepiece of the painter's oeuvre, a series of forty-four still-life paintings. These, which were listed in an early nineteenth- century inventory of the royal palace at Aranjuez and are mentioned by Cein Bermuldez in his biography of the artist of 1800, are today identified with thirty-nine paintings in the Museo del Prado, four in the collection of the Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid, and one in the Museo Nacional, Valladolid. In her monograph, Tufts relates the 'scientific objectivity' of these paintings to the growing interest in botanical studies during the second half of the eighteenth century. Two unpublished documents in the Archivo General del Palacio, Madrid, now show that several of these paintings were indeed appreciated as scientific illustrations of Spain's natural bounty by the Prince and Princess of Asturias (the future king Charles IV and his wife, Maria Luisa), who commissioned further works with that purpose in mind. The first document (see Appendix I, below) is Melkndez's own account of the delivery (Entrega) of several paintings to Charles and Maria Luisa on three different occasions during 1771 and 1772; the second (see Appendix II, below), dated January 1778, is an unsigned draft of a report written to settle a dispute with the artist about payment for these works.

TOURISTS wanting typical souvenirs from Majorca often return clutching crudely fashioned figurines in the form of penny-whistles, painted in striking accents of colour on a predominantly white ground, which at first sight look remarkably like maquettes for sculptures by Miró. In fact, these whistles became emblematic of Miró's work, and when the artist stayed with Roland Penrose for his retro- spective exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1964, he too, appropriately, brought one of them with him as a present.'