Jacinto Benavente y Martínez

Jacinto Benavente y Martínez, painted in 1917 and now at the Hispanic Society of America, portrays the Spanish playwright who was the dominant figure of Spanish theatre in the early twentieth century and would receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1922. Benavente's sophisticated comedies of manners dissected the bourgeois society of Restoration Spain with ironic precision, making him simultaneously the most commercially successful and the most culturally prestigious Spanish dramatist of his era. Sorolla's portrait, executed five years before the Nobel, documents a figure already recognised as Spain's foremost living playwright. The theatrical subject gave Sorolla an interesting challenge: how to convey the wit and social intelligence that made Benavente's plays compelling through the necessarily static medium of portraiture.

The playwright's face is modelled with particular attention to the quality of social intelligence and comic observation — the features of a man who spent his professional life watching and anatomising social behaviour. Sorolla uses a slightly more animated pose than for scholarly sitters, the dramatist's world being inherently more social and performance-oriented than the academic's. The warmth of Sorolla's flesh painting suits a subject known for comedy over tragedy.