After going to the town of Ceret in the French Pyrennées on 18 May 1912, Picasso painted this still life, showing how close he felt to Spain and his family and friends in Barcelona. Earlier in May he had painted the two oval still lifes, which were souvenirs or memories of his trip with Braque to Le Havre in April. On a smaller scale but using the oval form and some of the same motifs, including letters, Picasso produced this "Spanish Still Life".
There are two preparatory drawings, which were both shown with the painting at the exhibition Picasso and Braque at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1989-90. Both are rectangular, which may not mean that Picasso had not initially intended an oval painting. One element that is common to both drawings and the painting is an assertive bottle of Spanish anisette called ojen, the letters of which appear on all three bottles. Another is a fragment of the masthead of the Barcelona newspaper, La Publicidad: ICIDAD, in the smallest of the drawings, CIDA in the other, and CIDAD in the painting. Otherwise the painting departs from the drawings. Both drawings have a bullfight poster at the left, advertising (if in fragmentary fashion) a CORRIDA DE TOROS, with a QUI looming over it. Both are more precise about the contents of the bottle by showing part of AGUARDIENTE, an eau-de-vie, below and to the left of OJEN for the anisette. Both have a mysterious card at the lower left with four glasses printed on it. But both also have an animation and confidence in the lettering that Picasso confirms in the painting.
In painting within the oval, Picasso provided a greater stability by giving the composition a table. And on the table he placed three glasses--a squared goblet in the background at the left; in front of the bottle, a more conventional rounded glass with a cigarette lying before it; and to the right of the bottle, a radiant glass and spoon with a rod across it that seems to have burst into flame like a child's drawing of the sun, which it has been suggested could be a chalice. The newspaper, La Publicidad is carefully folded. To the left is a flagon which Joan Rosselet tells us is an inkwell, conveniently in front of an envelope whose address we can only partially read, but, since we do find "Don/Barcel," Daix and Rosselet must be correct in suggesting it is a letter from Picasso to his father in Barcelona, presumably written in that cafe. Finally, there is the ultimate Spanish detail, a ticket to a bullfight in the foreground in the Spanish national colors of red and yellow with black letters, painted in Ripolin so that, as Daix and Rosselet point out, it has the effect of a collage. Sol (the sun) refers to the sunny side of the ring and Sombre to the shadow. Across the ticket is a painter's brush, with full soft bristles and a point, placed horizontally as if it could be as powerful as a sword.
The subject matter makes it clear that this is a Spanish painting. There is something about the coldness of the grays in most of the still life and the severity of those forms that can remind us of religious paintings by seventeenth-century artists like El Greco, Zurbaran, and Murillo, embodying a tradition of austerity and discipline, perhaps the somberness of the shadow of the bullring. This is contrasted with the freely painted rose and gray background, surely a sky rather than a wall, and suggesting, sadly, a setting sun. only in the foreground is an optimism for Spain expressed in the brilliant red and gold (and even perhaps in the physical presence of the brush). Admittedly, the "Spanish Still Life" is painted with less exquisite discipline and clarity than Picasso's two "Souvenirs du Havre", but it is executed with greater density and passion.