Tipos de La Mancha

Painted in 1912 as part of the studies that fed into the great Vision of Spain mural cycle for the Hispanic Society of America, 'Tipos de La Mancha' documents the rural character types of the central Spanish plateau. La Mancha, immortalised by Cervantes as Don Quixote's home territory, was a landscape of vast plains, windmills, and a rugged peasant population whose material culture had changed little since the seventeenth century. Sorolla spent years travelling Spain's regions on behalf of the Hispanic Society's commission, producing documentary sketches and studies of local costume, physiognomy, and landscape. These preparatory works captured a Spain that was beginning to disappear under the pressures of modernisation and migration to industrial cities. The figures are depicted with ethnographic directness — their regional dress, weathered complexions, and characteristic tools recorded as irreplaceable cultural data. Sorolla's project for the Hispanic Society, completed in 1919, stands as one of the most ambitious decorative programmes in early twentieth-century painting, and works like this canvas formed its indispensable visual foundation.

Figures in regional dress are rendered with rapid but specific attention to the textiles and accessories that distinguished one Spanish province from another. Sorolla's outdoor light hits the subjects with typical Mediterranean directness, and the warm earth tones of Castilian landscape form a natural backdrop that neither competes with nor diminishes the figures.