Joaquín Sorolla

Joaquín Sorolla (1863–1923) was a Spanish painter from Valencia who became the most celebrated Spanish artist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through his dazzling command of Mediterranean light. Born in Valencia, he was orphaned at two and raised by his aunt and uncle. He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Valencia under Cayetano Palmaroli and Gonzalo Salvá before winning a scholarship to the Spanish Academy in Rome in 1885. Four years in Rome, followed by a period in Paris in 1889–1890, gave him a thorough grounding in both academic technique and contemporary French naturalism. His early work includes history and social-realist paintings—such as the defence of the Monteleon barracks and Padre Jofré defending a lunatic—that won him official recognition. By the 1890s, however, he had found his true subject: the beaches of Valencia and the Mediterranean coast, flooded with brilliant sunshine, populated by bathers, fishermen, and children. His light paintings—loose, rapid, supremely confident—brought him international fame. In 1909 he had a triumphant solo exhibition at the Hispanic Society of America in New York, and in 1911 he received a commission to paint the monumental Visions of Spain mural cycle for the Society's library in New York—fourteen large canvases depicting the regions of Spain, completed by 1919 and considered his greatest work. He also produced an extensive body of portraits of the Spanish aristocracy, including a commissioned portrait of King Alfonso XIII. He died in 1923, partly from the effects of a stroke suffered while painting in his garden.

Sorolla is above all a painter of light—specifically the intense, reflected, almost blinding light of the Valencian coast. His brushwork is rapid and gestural, laying in large areas of colour with confident strokes and using broken whites and pale blues to capture the shimmer of sunlit water and bleached sand. His figures—children bathing, fishing boats drawn up on shore, women in traditional dress—are dissolved into the general dazzle of the scene rather than isolated as academic set pieces. His palette is famously high-keyed and joyful. The early works in this batch—including Santa en oración (1888) and Clotilde at the Window (1888)—show his academic training still dominant, but the gestural confidence that would become his signature is already evident.

Sorolla is the defining figure of Spanish Impressionism and the most internationally successful Spanish painter between Goya and Picasso. His triumph in New York in 1909—the largest exhibition by a living artist yet staged in America—made him an international celebrity. The Visions of Spain murals at the Hispanic Society are among the most ambitious mural cycles in twentieth-century painting. His influence on subsequent Spanish painting was enormous.