Who Was Joaquín Sorolla, the Painter of Light?

There is a kind of light that only exists on a Mediterranean beach at midday: white, flat, bouncing off wet sand and off the sea until it seems to come from everywhere at once. Most painters avoid it because it kills shadow and flattens form. Joaquín Sorolla spent his life running toward it.

An orphan in Valencia

Sorolla was born in Valencia in 1863. A cholera epidemic killed both his parents two years later, and he and his infant sister were raised by an aunt and uncle, a locksmith who hoped the boy would join the trade. He drew instead. By fifteen he was at the Valencia art school; by twenty-one a painting of his had won him a scholarship to Rome.

He learned his craft the conventional way, with history paintings and big social subjects, and one of those made his name.

Sad Inheritance is a serious, almost grim picture, and the sea in it is grey. It is the last painting of that kind he made. He had found what he wanted to paint, and it was the light in the water behind those boys.

Sewing the sail

The turn is already visible in Sewing the Sail of 1896, painted three years earlier: a courtyard in Valencia, a huge white sail spread across the ground, women stitching it, and sunlight breaking through vine leaves onto the cloth in a hundred spots. The subject is work. The real subject is what light does to white.

The beach paintings

From about 1900 on, Sorolla painted the beach at Valencia, then Jávea, Biarritz, and San Sebastián, over and over: boys wading, girls in wet white dresses, oxen hauling fishing boats up the sand, his wife Clotilde and their daughters walking at the water's edge. He worked outdoors, fast, on big canvases braced against the wind, often finishing a picture in a single session before the light moved.

People call him the Spanish Impressionist, and the comparison is fair up to a point: he painted outdoors, quickly, and cared about light more than subject. But Monet dissolved the world into color. Sorolla kept it solid. His figures have weight, his water has depth, and his brush describes a wet child's back as accurately as any academic painter could, only faster. Look at the Prado picture above and the difference is plain.

New York, 1909

In 1909 Archer Huntington, the railroad heir who founded the Hispanic Society of America in New York, put on a Sorolla exhibition of more than 350 paintings. It ran for a month. Somewhere near 160,000 people came, a number that made the newspapers and made Sorolla, briefly, the most famous living painter in America. He painted President Taft in Washington and stayed on to paint portraits for New York money.

Huntington then commissioned the largest work of Sorolla's life: fourteen enormous canvases called Vision of Spain, one for each region of the country, to line the society's library. Sorolla spent most of a decade on them, travelling Spain with his easels and painting fishermen, dancers, and processions on canvases up to fourteen feet high. They were finished in 1919. He never saw them installed.

The end

In 1920 Sorolla suffered a stroke while painting a portrait in his Madrid garden. He never worked again and died in 1923 at sixty. His widow gave the house and its contents to the state, and it opened as the Museo Sorolla in 1932: his studio, his garden, and hundreds of his paintings exactly where he left them. It is one of the most pleasant museums in Europe and one of the least crowded.

Then the world moved on. Picasso, a fellow Spaniard thirty years younger, made sunlit beaches look like the nineteenth century, and for most of the twentieth Sorolla was filed under pleasant and minor. That has changed. Major exhibitions in London, Paris, and Madrid over the past two decades put him back where his contemporaries had him, and Vision of Spain still hangs in New York.

Where to see him

Madrid has the most: the Museo Sorolla and a strong group at the Prado. New York has the Hispanic Society with the murals and more than a hundred other works. In Los Angeles, the Getty has a handful, and they are the best place on the West Coast to see what he could do.

Open Joaquín Sorolla on DiscoverArt to scroll through more than three hundred of his paintings, and see whether the light gets to you the way it got to New York in 1909.