Preparation of raisins

Preparation of Raisins from 1901, at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, depicts the labor of drying and sorting grapes into raisins — an agricultural process specific to the Valencian and Alicante coast, where Muscatel grapes were dried in the sun to produce one of the region's most valuable exports. Sorolla was drawn to agricultural labor as a subject throughout his career, seeing in the rhythmic work of field and harvest a continuation of the same elemental human engagement with nature that he found in fishing. The Pushkin Museum's acquisition of this work reflects the enthusiastic Russian reception of Sorolla's social realism alongside his luminism.

The outdoor agricultural setting gives Sorolla access to his characteristic full Mediterranean sunlight — figures at work in the open air, their bodies and the grape-laden surfaces catching the intense southern light. The social documentation is inseparable from the painterly opportunity.