Juan Ramón Jiménez

Juan Ramón Jiménez, painted in 1916 and now at the Hispanic Society of America, depicts the Andalusian poet who would receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1956, recognised for his lyrical poetry and above all for Platero and I (1914), a prose poem about a man and his donkey in the landscape of Huelva that became one of the most beloved texts in the Spanish language. At the time of the portrait, Jiménez was thirty-five and at an early but already distinguished point in his career, his Modernist poetry establishing him as the leading lyric voice of his generation. Sorolla's portrait of a poet concerned with sensory experience, colour, and light creates an interesting meeting of sensibilities — both men fundamentally committed to the precise observation and evocation of Mediterranean light and landscape.

The portrait of a lyric poet required Sorolla to find a quality of sensitivity and interior attention that differed from the more assertive intellectual bearing of philosophers and playwrights. Jiménez's face is modelled with careful, warm tones that avoid the sharper characterisation Sorolla gave to more combative temperaments. The handling is gentle without being vague — a portrait of sensitivity that retains pictorial authority.