This is a painting on cardboard that Roberta González gave to Eusebio Sempere as a token of their great friendship, along with the Montserrat criant nº 2, two sculptures and about thirty drawings by Julio González, as Sempere himself declared in 1976. The collection of works by the artist constitutes one of the most singular testimonies of the affective and intellectual bond that united the Alicante-born artist with the González family.

Nature morte is a simple still life executed around the nineteen twenties and resolved through pictorial planes that reveal the influence of cubism and the constructivist currents of the time. On the plane of an inclined table, and on top of a white cloth, are arranged a black bottle, a loaf of bread, and a painted ceramic pitcher. The palette is articulated around earth tones, siennas and whites, with the black bottle acting as a vertical element that anchors and organizes the composition.

The work belongs to the lesser-known facet of Julio González, that of painter, eclipsed by his revolutionary contribution to iron sculpture. However, pieces like this allow us to trace the solid pictorial training that the Barcelona-born artist acquired in his early years in Paris, where he frequented avant-garde circles and cultivated a close friendship with Pablo Picasso. The compositional sobriety and the geometric treatment of volumes anticipate, on the pictorial plane, the same principles that González would later transfer to metal: the reduction of forms to their structural essence and the dialogue between plane and space.