The Sculptor, Mariano Benlliure y Gil

The Sculptor, Mariano Benlliure y Gil, painted in 1917 and now at the Hispanic Society of America, depicts one of the most celebrated Spanish sculptors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — a Valencian contemporary of Sorolla whose monumental bronzes, equestrian statues, and funerary monuments defined public visual culture in Spain during the Restoration period. The portrait of a fellow artist from Valencia, painted in the same year as several other Hispanic Society portraits, carries the particular interest of one visual artist examining another. Benlliure and Sorolla shared cultural context, artistic generation, and Valencian identity; the portrait is simultaneously an assessment of a peer and a document of the Valencian artistic generation that had dominated Spanish visual culture for thirty years. The sculptor's working environment, if depicted, would have provided an unusually physical portrait setting.

Sorolla's portrait of a sculptor engages with the interesting tension between painting's pursuit of light and surface and sculpture's assertion of mass and volume. Benlliure's face is modelled with a sculptor's attention to the underlying bone structure — Sorolla's paint implying solid form beneath the skin. Any sculptural work in the background would be rendered with careful attention to the different materiality of bronze or marble versus canvas.