Sorolla through light

1863

Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida is born in Valencia on 27 February. He becomes an orphan at the age of two and is taken in by his aunt and uncle.

1876-1878 Education in Valencia

He attends drawing classes at the Crafts School of Valencia and later enters the Fine Arts School. There he meets and befriends Tono García del Castillo, whose father, the photographer Antonio García Peris, will become a Sorolla patron for some years. The painter starts to court his daughter Clotilde.

1881-1887 Madrid, Rome, Paris

Sorolla begins to see the world. In 1881, he visits the Museo del Prado and is profoundly impressed with Velázquez’s paintings. In 1884, his painting The Cry of the Palleter earns him a pension from the Provincial Council of Valencia to study in Rome. He rubs shoulders with the colony of Spanish artists there, works and visits museums. In Rome, he meets Pedro Gil Moreno de Mora, who will become a close lifelong friend. He invites Sorolla to his house in Paris, where he stays for six months, working intensely and visiting museums and exhibitions. He is particularly impressed by the works of the naturalist painters Adolf von Menzel and Jules Bastien-Lepage. After this first journey, Sorolla frequently returns to Paris to learn about the latest developments in art.

1888-1890 Marriage and hardships

Sorolla goes back to Valencia and marries Clotilde. Together they travel to Italy and live in Assisi for a while. There he paints, seeking his “true path” in realism, while he barely ekes out a living selling his little paintings and watercolors. In 1889, the couple travels to Paris to visit the Universal Exhibition, and Sorolla is impressed by the Nordic painters Peder Severin Krøyer and Anders Zorn. The couple moves permanently to Madrid. Their first daughter, María, is born in 1890.

1891-1898 Family, work and social realism

Their second child, Joaquín, is born in 1892, followed by Elena in 1895. Sorolla is now a responsible head of household; he regularly participates in exhibitions in Spain and abroad and begins to receive awards and important commissions. Certain now of his style, he produces ambitious works within the sphere of social realism which are warmly welcomed in exhibitions. In 1893, he paints Another Marguerite!, which sells in the United States, and in 1894 he makes They Still Say Fish are Expensive!, White Slave Trade and The Return from Fishing, which is acquired by the French state. This series ends with Sad Inheritance, from 1899.

1900-1903 The road to success

In 1900, he receives the Grand Prix at the Universal Exposition in Paris for his entire oeuvre, but especially for Sad Inheritance. There he personally meets major painters like Giovanni Boldini, John Singer Sargent and Anders Zorn. In 1901, he is awarded the Medal of Honor at the National Fine Arts Exhibition in Madrid. Clotilde faithfully accompanies him in all the stages of his life. Around this time, Sorolla dedicates two beautiful homages to her: Mother, where he depicts her in bed with their newborn daughter Elena, and Woman Nude, an intimate and intensely sensual work. He regularly paints on the beach of Valencia. Along with his paintings of social themes, he develops a new line of scenes showing the lives of the fishermen, optimistic views that distil the beauty of the sea and the joy of the sunshine. He starts a large-format line with Sewing the Sail (1896), which he also displays in Paris in 1900, and his milestone work Afternoon Sun (1903), which Sorolla himself sees as the onset of his maturity as an artist.

1904-1905 Light, color

In 1904, he paints almost 250 works, some of them emblematic, like Summer, and late that year his family moves to a new home, a house with a studio and a large garden. His work focuses increasingly on studying light and color. His successive stays in the small port town of Jávea in Alicante (in 1896, 1898, 1900 and 1905) reveal to him a sea with deep, crystalline water, unlike the beach in Valencia, and familiarize him with brighter and more brilliant colors, the new effects of lights and reflections. His 1900 work End of the Day is a manifesto of that new sensibility. In his stay in 1905, Sorolla studies the transparency of bodies immersed in the water and produces masterpieces like The White Boat.

1906 First solo exhibition: Paris

In July, he holds his first major solo exhibition at the Georges Petit Gallery in Paris, one of the most prestigious galleries. He shows 450 paintings and garners enthusiastic accolades. The critics clamor in praise and the sales confirm the warm reception of his paintings. He spends the summer in Biarritz, where he paints another type of beach with cool, clean colors: the beach of the fashionable summer crowd who enjoy the sea area all dressed up. He spends the autumn painting landscapes in Segovia and Toledo, a genre which will gradually become more prominent in his oeuvre. His daughter María contracts a serious case of tuberculosis, and the family moves to a house in the El Pardo forest.

1907 Exhibitions in Germany and rest in La Granja

In 1907, Sorolla sends an exhibition of 280 works to Berlin, Düsseldorf and Cologne. He is unable to go personally because of his daughter’s illness. In the summer, with María recovered, the family moves to La Granja de San Ildefonso, where Sorolla paints in the gardens, taking advantage of the beauty of the light sifting through the trees to make plein-air portraits, including the extraordinary Portrait of King Alfonso XIII in a Hussar's Uniform.

1908 Exhibition in London

In February, he paints in the gardens of the Alcázar of Sevilla. London’s Grafton Galleries hosts an exhibition of 450 Sorolla works from May to June, a show with important sponsors which opened to great fanfare. There, a portrait of Manuel B. Cossío was sold, a prominent intellectual from the Institución Libre de Enseñanza and the author of the first major monograph written on El Greco. Sorolla, a close friend of the writer and an admirer of his work, painted him again soon after in a portrait boasting extraordinary sobriety and elegance that exudes the sitter’s intelligence and sensibility. Sorolla takes advantage of his stay there to visit museums, and he finds in intense enjoyment in Phidias’ sculptures for the Athens Parthenon in the British Museum. When he returns to Spain with the memory of the Greek sculptures fresh in his mind, he paints beach scenes in Valencia where the adolescents frolicking in the water and sunshine evoke the dream of a happy “Mediterranean” humanity that enjoys the gifts of nature.

1909 New York. The great American adventure

The Hispanist and philanthropist Archer Milton Huntington, the founder of the Hispanic Society of America, invites Sorolla to hold a major exhibition in its new building in New York. The show opens in February to resounding success: in one month it is visited by 160,000 people, the critics unanimously praise it and sales abound. A somewhat smaller version of the same exhibition is later shown at the Copley Society in Boston and the Fine Arts Academy of Buffalo. Sorolla returns to Spain definitively rich and famous. His stay in Valencia that summer is one of his most productive; some of his most famous beach paintings date from this period, including Women Walking on the Beach and The Horse’s Bath.

1910 Portraits and gardens

1910 is an outstanding year for family portraits, including Clotilde Seated on the Sofa, Clotilde in Evening Dress, María in a Red Blouse and Elena in Black Hat. In previous stays in Andalusia (1908 and 1909), Sorolla had painted in the Alhambra of Granada and the Alcázar of Sevilla. He is attracted by Andalusian gardens with their mixture of vegetation, architecture and water. Now, in 1910, he once again paints in both places: gardens are beginning to take up more room in his painting and his thinking.

1911 A new house

The Hispanic Society organizes Sorolla exhibitions at the Art Institute de Chicago and the City Art Museum of Saint Louis.

The family spends the summer in San Sebastián, where Sorolla paints one of his most original works: The Siesta. In December, his family moves to a new house they had built in what was then called Paseo del Obelisco, now General Martínez Campos, a small palace for which Sorolla himself designed and planted a beautiful garden, drawing inspiration from the motifs in the Alhambra of Granada and the Alcázar of Sevilla which had so impressed him. He signs a contract with Huntington to decorate the library of the Hispanic Society with a series of scenes of the archetypes and customs of the different regions of Spain: Vision of Spain.

1912-1914 Vision of Spain

Sorolla starts work on the decoration, which is comprised of a set of large paintings, some of them joined together to create larger panels. This work occupies him intensely until 1919. He travels all around the country making life studies in order to execute the panels, some of which he paints wholly in situ, outdoors. He begins with the large panel of Castile, which is the largest in the series. In the summers, he has a change of scenery and moves to San Sebastián, where he rests and paints. The outbreak of the Great War halts exhibitions. Sorolla does not travel abroad again.

1915-1916 And always, the beach of Valencia

In these two years, as he travels tirelessly around Spain to make the panels, Sorolla spends the summers in Valencia, where he paints monumental beach scenes, such as Fisherwomen from Valencia and The Pink Robe, which show an increasingly wise, more mature use of light.

1917-1918 More travels

In 1917 and 1918, he again paints in the Alhambra and the Alcázar for the last time. He continues to travel to create the Vision of Spain. After Valencia, Couples on Horseback (1916) and Extremadura, The Market (1917), he paints Elche, The Palm Grove, which glows with golden light.

1919 Endings

He completes Vision of Spain. Without betraying exhaustion or decline, he makes his best scenes: Ayamonte, The Tunny Catch, the last of all and one of the most beautiful light spectacles that Sorolla ever painted. He paints his last beach scenes on Mallorca and Ibiza, and even in The Smugglers he astonishes with bold perspectives and a cleaner, brighter blue. The garden at his house has grown enough to be painted, and Sorolla enjoys painting it.

1920-1923 The painter in his garden

In 1920, Sorolla is only 57 years old, but he looks like an elderly man: the last few years of hard work on Vision of Spain have broken his health. By then he has received all the medals, honors and applause an artist could aspire to; he is famous, respected, wealthy and adored by his family and friends. Now he rests, painting his garden and a few portraits set there, under the trees.

In June 1920, as he is painting a portrait under the pergola, he suffers from hemiplegia. He will never paint again. He will still live for three more years, pampered by his family but now detached from everything around him. He dies in August 1923. His burial in Valencia is attended by flocks of people: Sorolla was at the peak of his popularity.

1926 Vision of Spain is installed in the Hispanic Society

In 1922, the panels of Vision of Spain had been transported to New York. The library of the Hispanic Society, with the Sorolla panels finally installed, is left open to the public.

1929-1932 The Sorolla Museum

Clotilde dies in 1929 and bequeaths the family home and her collection of Sorolla paintings to Spain so a museum can be made. The creation of the museum goes through a tumultuous period in the country’s history: the end of the reign of Alphonse XIII and the proclamation of the Second Republic. However, these circumstances did not stop the project: the bequest was accepted in 1931 and the museum opened in 1932.