Sorolla, one hundred years of modernity

From the start, Joaquín Sorolla realised that success in exhibitions and salons was the key to living off his art. With a solid academic grounding and exceptional skill as a painter, he set out to win as many prizes as possible. Both his works portraying everyday life and those denouncing social injustices brought him a solid prestige in the art world that was corroborated by numerous medals. His unique approach to the painting of local custom also entranced the public and catapulted him to fame.
His path to success had begun in Madrid in 1884 and was subsequently consolidated by emblematic works like Paris Boulevard (1890), After Bathing (1892), And They Still Say Fish is Expensive! and Return from Fishing (1894). In 1900, he reached the pinnacle of his career when he won a Grand Prix at the Universal Exposition in Paris, followed in 1901 by the medal of honour in Madrid.

Joaquín Sorolla is unanimously recognised as the Spanish painter of the sea, which inspired him to create some of his most beautiful and iconic images.
In his marine scenes, he developed a personal poetics that placed all the resources of modernism at the service of his artistic ideas. The artist assigned a repertory of symbolic codes to every geographical area of the Spanish coast that he represented in his paintings. While the beaches of Valencia were the setting for naturalist depictions of an age-old classicism, the transparent waters of Jávea were a laboratory for experimentation with composition and colour. On the Bay of Biscay, his most socially-minded facet emerged with the display of a range of fashionably dressed figures exhibiting themselves to be seen and admired.
All these pictures of the Spanish coastline now form part of our collective imagination.
 

The portrait hides a mute dialogue between two human beings. The person painting is as important as the one being painted, and a need for individual recognition is revealed on both sides. It certainly involves vanity, whether disguised or exhibited. Contemplating a portrait invites us to feel two gazes suspended in an instant. Any emotion is circumstantial. Brought into the present is an ephemeral time and an uncertain space where the sitters pose, and where everything can therefore change at any moment. Sitting for a portrait is uncomfortable but also an act of self-surrender, a recognition of professional merit or of affection. A relaxed attitude reveals a pleasant encounter. Artist and sitter are there because that is what they are. Sorolla handles artifice with natural ease. We look upon the truth of an intimate meeting, and that intimacy suggests authenticity of feeling. There is no need to narrate anything, merely to feel. In the silence of the painting, all is said.

In 1910, when Sorolla was at the peak of his career, he received the most important commission of his life from Archer M. Huntington: a series of fourteen panels to decorate the library of the Hispanic Society of America that are known today as Vision of Spain.
In compliance with Huntington’s interests, and carried forward by a regenerationist impulse to dignify what was being lost, Sorolla filled the 210 square metres at his disposal to show the American public a representation of the life and culture of Spain at that time, with the essence of each of its regions. The two most amply represented were Castile and Andalusia.
From 1912 to 1919, he travelled all over the Iberian Peninsula painting large-format studies of ‘character types’ in their traditional costumes under the specific light of each place. In those regions whose costumes were less richly decorative, he included backgrounds that grant greater importance to the landscape, as we see in Character Types of La Mancha and Character Types of Roncal.
 

Besides his views of the sea, Sorolla also painted numerous landscapes, first for their own sake and later, after the commission for Vision of Spain, as backgrounds for his great human panoramas. He was attracted by grandiose scenery like the mountain ranges of Guadarrama and Granada’s Sierra Nevada, but more secluded spots also prompted him to seek movement in rivers, reflections in water, shifting shadows and bold framings. For him, the continual variation of the light with the movement of the sun was the key to the life of a landscape.
From 1906, Sorolla experimented with the light filtered through the foliage of gardens, in which he started to set some portraits. The Alhambra in Granada and the Alcázar of Seville greatly attracted him with their mixture of architecture, vegetation and water. After 1911, he started to design and plant his own garden, and he began painting it in 1916. That was his private piece of nature and his Eden during his final years.