Joaquín Sorolla (1863-1923)

Following his years as a student at the Royal Academy of San Carlos, Sorolla travelled to Italy with a scholarship from the Provincial Council of Valencia. During his stay there, he spent time in Rome and the small town of Assisi, where he perfected his academic training. The study of the nude and the opportunity to familiarize himself with old and modern masters in Italy played a decisive role in his formation as an artist. But the grant also allowed him to visit the other artistic capital of the period, Paris, where he was exposed to the academic realism that would inspire him to paint social themes. Upon his return to Spain, Sorolla settled in Madrid, where he successfully participated in several National Fine Art Exhibitions. In these events he presented his most committed paintings in this new genre. And They Still Say Fish is Expensive! sums up his ambitious efforts at the time to strike a balance between subjects of a contained dramatic nature, and realistic execution with special attention to light, which began to emerge as his chief concern. These public successes also brought him his fi rst commissions for private collectors, paintings that refl ected attractive popular themes in which Sorolla gradually introduced his bold artistic innovations.

Return from Fishing was Sorolla’s first major international success. Shown at the 1895 Paris Salon, it marked his debut on the European stage and consolidated his reputation in Spain. Sorolla’s stay in the French capital also infl uenced his work in canvases such as After the Bath, which shows a shift in taste towards the academic style that dominated the Parisian market. Sewing the Sail confirmed his previous success. The pictorial representation of the effects of sunlight that characterize these two major works increasingly drew the artist’s attention, becoming the true hallmark of his art. This quest to portray sunlight, using the sails of fi shing boats as his best resource, led to Eating on the Boat, a painting in which the sail also enabled the artist to enclose the space where the action unfolds.

These same years saw the rise in Sorolla’s international reputation echoed by a greater interest on the part of private clients to buy his work. To meet this demand, he increasingly painted popular genre subjects and began a successful career as a portrait painter.

Sad Inheritance established Sorolla’s reputation in Paris and secured his status on the international scene. The impact of this work, which earned him the Grand Prix at the 1900 World Fair, made him the most successful living Spanish painter, confi rming critical interest in his art—an art that explored nature with sincerity and had the seashore as the privileged setting for his paintings. From then on, we see a change in the execution of his work. In canvases such as Mending the Sails, the brushstrokes became freer and more energetic, in search of a more direct portrayal of the depicted moment and a more faithful rendition of the effect of light. Preparing Raisins shows a progression towards a much more daring modernity, in which contemporary social themes are subordinated to the pure expression of an image.

Mother, on the other hand, marked the appearance in his oeuvre of distinctly intimate images, linked to the most private aspects of Sorolla’s life. These became a regular feature of his work, and following their success, the artist continued to pursue them until the end of his career.

As with so many other artists of his day, Sorolla’s visits to the Museo del Prado, where he was able to learn directly from the great Spanish masters, had great impact on his painting. Velázquez’s influence on his work, which critics recognized from the start, in the fi rst canvases he presented to public contests in Spain, became much more evident following his international success in Paris in 1900. From that moment on, Sorolla adopted Velázquez’s models as his own, alluding to some of his most famous pieces and even copying the resources used by the Sevillian artist.

Sorolla’s provocative Female Nude—in which the artist secretly celebrated the sensual quality of his wife’s body—evokes Velázquez’s Venus at her Mirror, while his family group portraits are modelled after Las Meninas. But references to the Sevillian master’s works are not always so direct. His admiration and appropriation of the Sevillian master’s portrait models resulted in dignifi ed likenesses such as those of the Beruetes, in which Sorolla achieves a characteristic sensation of immediacy, or that of The Photographer Christian Franzen where, again mimicking Velázquez, he provides the arresting image of a shared gaze, creating a disjunction between represented space and real space.

Sorolla’s art reached the peak of its maturity in Afternoon Sun. Here, the painter’s interest in capturing the effects of natural light, in this case in a scene featuring a fishing boat being hauled ashore after a day’s work, bathed in the setting sun of a Valencian summer evening —a theme already explored in Return from Fishing—is carried to its utmost limits. Tackled with complete artistic freedom, this visually powerful canvas allowed him to exploit the potential of the colossal dimensions of the fi gures and the imposing presence of the sail, as well as the swelling movement of the sea, captured here with frenzied energy.

Exhibited in various cities in the United States, the painting now returns to Spain for the fi rst time since it was acquired for The Hispanic Society of America of New York in 1909. When Sorolla discovered the harsh, rugged geography of Jávea and the vividly blue tonality of its transparent waters, he found the perfect setting for some of the scenes that allowed him to tackle compositions more daring than those which appear in his earlier paintings. These pieces already bear the artist’s uniquely personal and immediately recognizable mark.

Following his overwhelming international success, Sorolla enjoyed an unprecedented degree of creative freedom that is reflected in all aspects of his work. In the field of portraiture, he produced wholly original prototypes, using the closest members of his family as his main models. Though key portraits such as Señora de Sorolla in Black present the artist’s elegant wife indoors, in a room of their home in Madrid, in most of his best likenesses he used a garden as the natural backdrop for his sitters. The canvas that sums up better than any other the passionate, unrestrained sense of painting in Sorolla is María Dressed as a Valencian Peasant Girl, in which he recreates the rich play of light on the young woman’s regional costume with dazzling refl ections and bold, changing colours.

At around the same time, Sorolla painted Summer, one of the most powerful beach scenes he had produced until then. In this exceptional painting, the infl uence of Greek statuary fuses with that of photography as the painter attempts to capture a snapshot of the fi gures moving on the seashore, paralyzing them in the midst of their actions.

During the summer of 1909, Sorolla moved to La Malvarrosa beach, where he felt a completely happy man. His triumph in Europe had been followed by further success in the United States, and the critical acclaim his work received was only surpassed by its warm reception on the market, which continued to demand more and more paintings by the artist.

This period of fulfi lment and self-assurance saw the artist create a series of interesting paintings, all set on the water’s edge. They are euphoric, extraordinarily luminous works that include some of the artist’s most representative pieces. In them, the Mediterranean classicism that hovers over all of Sorolla’s oeuvre achieves its fullest expression, an effect that was reinforced by the frames the artist chose for many of them, inspired by Greek architecture. In fact, an almost musical harmony, like that of a calm classical procession, informs Strolling along the Seashore, a work that validates the artist’s fame, in which the material treatment is given special prominence. Scenes such as The Horse’s Bath and Boys on the Beach became not only evocations of the Mediterranean’s Greco-Roman past, but also icons of Sorolla’s work and the expression of a joyful interpretation of reality, in contrast to the pessimism of the Generation of ’98.

The Hispanic Society of America was founded in 1904 by the American magnate Archer M. Huntington, who conceived it as a place for the study and preservation of Hispanic culture in New York. Its founder also left the Society his vast and rich collection of artwork and historic pieces, primarily from Spain. In 1909, Sorolla and Huntington began a fertile relationship that greatly contributed to the painter’s success in the United States; the collector also bought some of his best works. In 1910, they planned the mural which Sorolla was to paint for the Library of the Society’s new headquarters, built in 1908, which was designed to be the nucleus of the institution’s activities. Though Huntington felt that this room should be decorated with the most important episodes from Spanish and Portuguese history, Sorolla convinced his patron to let him do a monumental frieze with the different landscapes of Spain, including the characteristic types of each region.

The artist devoted all his energy to this project, almost uninterruptedly, from 1911 to 1919, leaving behind a vision of the country consistent with the one held by Huntington and other Anglo-Saxon Hispanists who, despite the process of industrialization that had already begun in Spain, still had a neo-Romantic vision of the country, focused on its more timeless aspects and the survival of past customs. Huntington was very satisfied with the result, and in 1918, when he saw the nearly-complete series of panels, he said: ‘Sorolla has taken his theory of painting to the limit, and for that alone it will endure.’

As with his portraits, Sorolla’s landscapes were so outstanding that they alone would have been worthy of major recognition in his day. Infl uenced by his friend Aureliano de Beruete, the leading master of the genre in Spain at the time, Sorolla always showed an interest in the realistic portrayal of the effects of light in all kinds of weather and the faithful refl ection of the natural terrain. His landscapes are often the most tangible, immediate proof of the total freedom with which he painted. Though he concentrated on views of beaches, meadows, mountains and cities, from 1901 onwards Sorolla also executed landscapes that are a product of the contemplation of a single detail, representations of a daring modernity expressed through unusual framings and a very direct and fresh pictorial language.

The artist’s efforts to portray nature en plein air, which required a great deal of physical stamina, diminished as Sorolla grew older and he became weakened by illness. His fi nal work was therefore limited to the garden of his home in Madrid, now the Museo Sorolla. Sorolla painted his last pieces between the walls of these gardens, and it was there that he laid down his brushes for the last time.