Luis Meléndez wanted to work on vast canvases. Instead, somewhat reluctantly, he found his niche in a lesser genre, writes Aidan Dunne

The National Gallery of Ireland's new exhibition of the work of Luis Meléndez highlights one of the foremost Spanish painters of still life of the 18th century. He was born in Naples, in 1716, to a Spanish family that soon returned to Spain. Although Meléndez later went back to work in Italy for several years he was based in Spain throughout his life. His father, a painter of miniatures, was instrumental in establishing the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, and his uncle was a respected portraitist.

Though talented and capable, Meléndez was continually thwarted in his efforts to establish his reputation at the Spanish court. Significant commissions and appointments eluded him, and he never got the opportunity to prove himself in large-scale compositions of prestigious historical, portrait and religious subjects. In this he was certainly unlucky, but his pride may have been a factor as well.

Today his reputation rests on his achievement as a painter of still life, a role he fell in to almost by default and held for about 20 years, until his death, in 1780. Still life ranked low in the hierarchy of artistic genres.

As Dr Peter Cherry writes in his hugely informative and detailed catalogue essay on the artist and his work: "The central irony of Meléndez's career is that his artistic legacy was the product of adverse professional circumstances and had so little to do with his unrealised artistic ambitions."

Meléndez has been called the Spanish Chardin, a reference to the celebrated French painter of still life Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, but the comparison is not really apt: Chardin is a much more subtle, varied and resourceful painter. Meléndez's strengths in his paintings are the intensity of his gaze, which subjects workaday foods and utensils to almost scientifically attentive scrutiny, and his skill as a virtuoso of illusionistic effects in the versatile medium of oil paint. His work has a hyperreal quality that engages the eye.

Cherry's account of Meléndez's vain bid to succeed Pablo Pernicharo as royal painter around the time of Charles III's accession to the throne provides a sympathetic insight in to the difficulties he faced. Proud and ambitious, he put a high value on his own abilities, but he was utterly at the mercy of royal favour, which could be as fickle as it liked.

Nothing new there, of course. It was just a fact of life for numerous artists, composers and musicians throughout Europe. Meléndez was effectively facing catch-22: he couldn't tackle a major project without patronage and couldn't attract patronage without a major project that proved his credentials.

In a plot worthy of Pedro Almodóvar the hapless Meléndez, a painter of miniatures longing to break in to the big time, to show his abilities in large-scale portrait, religious and history painting, finally found royal approbation as a painter of still life, a little-regarded, peripheral genre. In fact he seems to have become identified as the still-life painter in Spain at the time, attracting commissions from private patrons and collectors. His biggest was for a series of still lifes to decorate the prince of Asturias's cabinet of natural history.

Cherry relates how, summoned at short notice by Princess Maria Luisa, at Epiphany in 1771, he found himself talking about providing dozens of paintings. A pretty good start to the year, one would think.

But Meléndez also saw the commission as a means to what he had consistently coveted: a court position of some form or another.

Again he was to be frustrated. Another petition to King Charles III, with his new series of oil paintings optimistically employed as leverage, led to nothing, as did yet another petition following the death of another royal painter.

One feels for the unfortunate Meléndez, given that his one major commission effectively confined him to a genre that carried little prestige and was extremely unlikely to impress royal patrons or their advisers.

Rather poignantly, Cherry reports, X-rays revealed a portrait of Charles III, probably copied from Mengs, buried beneath a still life by Meléndez, something that could be cruelly interpreted as perfectly symbolising his efforts to make headway at court and the course of his career as a whole.

The prince of Asturias, meanwhile, ignored a suggestion that Meléndez might merit a lifetime pension and further work. In fact the prince called off the scheme towards the end of 1776, a decision that Meléndez had difficulty accepting.

Cherry seems on the whole sceptical about the artist's suggestion that the suite of more than 40 still lifes would in some way constitute a natural history of Spain. The subject of the paintings comes across as too miscellaneous, and too content to reside within the bounds of generic convention, to reflect such an ambitious strategy.

One can certainly say of Luis Meléndez: Still Lifes that it does what it says on the tin. Meléndez may have become a still-life painter by default, but he is clearly interested to the point of obsession with the possibilities of verisimilitude offered by the technique of oil painting. In his depictions of fruits and vessels, breads and cloths, he delights in the precise achievement of three-dimensional effects. That is his aim, and he delivers it again and again.

That he aspires to such a static model of illusionistic perfection partly accounts for a certain sameness in his work. But so does the staid sobriety of his arrangements of food and containers and the uniformity of his low, close-up viewpoint. On the one hand his reputation rests on his capacity to make these things look real enough to clutch and eat, on the other he doesn't make them look particularly enticing. One feels it's more the idea of their material reality than their appeal to the appetite that entices him. They look convincing rather than appealing.

He monumentalises the objects that form his compositions, but, unlike, say, Giorgio Morandi, the great 20th-century Italian painter of still life who habitually used just the same few humble objects in his paintings, because Meléndez is so besotted with illusionistic effects his works never attain a level of abstraction.

That is, Morandi's paintings, though realistic, have an abstracted, architectonic, universal quality, where Meléndez's remain rooted in the faithful depiction of a given reality, not aspiring to move beyond that.

It is a serious limitation in his work, and it may partly derive from his lack of commitment to still life as offering a subject worthy of the full range of his artistic personality. Hence he brings virtuosity but no passion.

This exhibition is a generous opportunity for a reappraisal of his efforts, allowing us to see the work remote from the prejudices that may have influenced its reception in its time.

Luis Meléndez: Still Lifes is at the Millennium Wing of the National Gallery of Ireland from Wednesday until September 5th (admission €10, concessions and Thursdays €6). The accompanying catalogue by Dr Peter Cherry and Dr Juan Luna costs €35