El pillo de playa

Painted in 1891, 'El pillo de playa' — 'The Beach Rascal' or 'The Beach Urchin' — belongs to the early phase of Sorolla's engagement with children on the Valencia coast, before his technique had reached the full luminism of his mature period. The subject of the street or beach urchin — a poor or working-class child free of adult supervision, characterised by a combination of self-sufficiency and mischief — had a strong tradition in Spanish art, from Murillo's beggar boys to the genre painters of the nineteenth century. Sorolla's 'pillo' belongs to this tradition while modernising it: the child is placed on the Mediterranean beach in direct sunlight rather than the shaded courtyard or tavern of the Baroque and academic tradition. By 1891 Sorolla had returned from Rome and was building his exhibition career, and works like this one show him working out his approach to the figure-in-outdoor-light problem that would consume him for the next decade. The casual, unselfconscious presence of a working-class beach child offered him a model who would not perform for the painter.

The beach urchin figure in full outdoor sunlight — dark skin, minimal clothing, bright reflected light from the sand — presented a high-contrast chromatic subject very different from the pale-complexioned dressed figures of bourgeois portraiture. Sorolla used the tonal drama of dark skin in intense sunlight as an early exercise in his developing luminism.