Background

Joaquin Sorolla was born on February 27, 1863 in Valencia, Spain. He was the son of Joaquin Sorolla, a tradesman, and Concepción Bastida. In 1865, Joaquin's parents died and he and his sister were cared for by their aunt and uncle.

Education

Initially, Joaquin was educated in his native town. Some time later, he studied under the guidance of Cayetano Capuz and Salustiano Asenjo. At the age of eighteen he traveled to Madrid, vigorously studying master paintings in the Museo del Prado.

After completing his military service, Sorolla obtained a grant, which gave him an opportunity to study painting in Rome.

The painter also studied at Saint Charles Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Valencia.

Career

At the beginning of the 1900s, Joaquin concentrated his efforts mainly on the production of large canvases of orientalist, mythological, historical and social subjects, for representing them in salons and international exhibitions in Madrid, Paris, Venice, Munich, Berlin and Chicago.

In 1909, the painter made a successful debut in the United States in a solo exhibition at the Hispanic Society in New York. The resulting critical acclaim won him a commission to paint President William Howard Taft in 1909.

Although formal portraiture was not Sorolla's genre of preference, because it tended to restrict his creative appetites and could reflect his lack of interest in his subjects, the acceptance of portrait commissions proved profitable, and the portrayal of his family was irresistible.

Early in 1911 Sorolla visited the United States for the second time, and exhibited 161 new paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago. Later that year, the painter met Archer M. Huntington in Paris and signed a contract to paint a series of oils on life in Spain. The canvases, to be installed in the Hispanic Society of America, would range from 12 to 14 feet in height, and total 227 feet in length. There would be fourteen large panels in all. The major commission of his career, it would dominate the later years of Sorolla's life.

Huntington had envisioned the work depicting a history of Spain, but the painter preferred the less specific "Vision of Spain", eventually opting for a representation of the regions of the Iberian Peninsula, and calling it "The Provinces of Spain". Despite the immensity of the canvases, Sorolla painted all, but one en plein air and travelled to specific locales to paint them: Navarre, Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, Elche, Seville, Andalusia, Extremadura, Galicia, Guipuzcoa, Castile, Leon and Ayamonte, at each site painting models, posed in a local costume. Each painting celebrated the landscape and culture of its region, panoramas composed of throngs of laborers and locals. By 1917, he was, by his own admission, exhausted. He completed the final panel by the middle of 1919.

For the rest of his career, Sorolla drew his inspiration from the dazzling light on the waters by his home, and his beach scenes are marked by sharp contrasts of light and shade, brilliant colours, and vigorous brushstrokes.

Achievements

• Joaquin Sorolla first achieved major international success with his painting "Another Marguerite", for which he received the first prize at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago.
  
  The exhibition at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900 won him a medal of honour and his nomination as Knight of the Legion of Honour.
  
  The painter's works are kept in museums throughout Spain, Europe, America, and in many private collections in Europe and America.
  
  A high-speed Renfe train station has been named after Sorolla in Valencia.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Gardens at San Ildefonso

  • Mother

  • The Alcazat Seville

  • On the Rocks at Javea

  • Father Jofré Protecting a Madman

  • Valencia beach in the morning light

  • Fisherwomen on the Beach, Valencia

  • Orange trees on the road to Seville

  • After bathing, Valencia

  • Covachuelas, Toledo

  • Arrival of the Boats

  • View of Segovia

  • The bath, Javea

  • Portrait of lawyer Don Silverio de la Torre y Eguia

  • Blind Man of Toledo

  • Preparing Raisins

  • Mending the Sail

  • Lighthouse walk at Biarritz

  • Maria at the Beach, Biarritz

  • Boats in the Port, Valencia

  • The press

  • The arrival of the boats

  • My Family

  • Afternoon sun

  • End of the Day, Javea

  • Another Margarita

  • To the Water, Valencia

  • Snapshot at Biarritz

  • Portrait of Clothilde

  • Morning sun

  • Valencian fiesin an orange grove

  • Orange seller

  • On the Sand, Valencia Beach

  • The outskirts of Segovia

  • Looking for Crabs among the Rocks, Javea

  • Return from Fishing

  • Marian in the gardens, la Granja

  • Boat in Albufera

  • The Port of Valencia

  • Sea and rocks in San Esteban, Asturias

  • The nap, Asturias

  • Orchard House, Valencia (study)

  • Beach at Valencia

  • They Still Say that Fish is Expensive!

  • Rump of Valencia

  • Raimundo de Madrazo in his Paris garden

  • The Beach at Biarritz

  • Elena at her desk

  • Portrait of Countess of Santiago

  • Mending nets

  • Bathing at La Granja

  • Portrait of Antonio Elegido

  • Garden of Carlos V in the Alcázar, Seville

  • Skipping rope at La Granja

  • Elderly Castellano Pouring Wine

  • Idyll, Javea

  • Clotilde and Elena on the Rocks at Javea

  • Sad Inheritance Study (Beach Rascals)

  • The Christening

  • The Rainbow

  • Rocks at Javea, The White Boat

  • Clotilde in a Black Dress

  • A Rooftop with Flowers

  • Rocks of the Cape, Javea

  • Before the Bath

  • The white boat, Javea

  • Herding Geese in the Asturias

  • The Relic

  • Strolling along the Seashore

  • Cafe in Paris

  • Triana bridge, Seville

  • Sick Maria

  • Pine Trees

  • Ruins of Bunol

  • Three Boats By A Shore

  • Valencia, Two Little Girls on a Beach

  • Portrait Of Don Aureliano De Beruete

  • After the Bath

  • An Arab Examining a Pistol

  • Lunch on the Boat

  • Family Eratruriz

  • Maria Painting in El Pardo

  • Valencian Scene

  • Sea at Ibiza

  • Old Valencian Fisherman

  • The Fountain in the Alcázof Seville

  • Bathing Time

  • Benito Perez Galdos

  • Waiting

  • Valencian fisherman

  • On San Sebastian beach

  • Calle de St. Vicente, Mallorca

  • Aureliano de Beruete

  • Oxen in the sea, study for "Sun of afternoon"

  • Puente de Real

  • Head of an Italian Girl

  • Dragging the trawler

  • The First child

  • Windmills on the Tagus, Toledo

  • The Count of Artal

  • The Cave at San Javea

  • Rocks and the Lighthouse, Biarritz

  • Valencian boats

  • Asturian Landscape

  • Three Sails

  • Surtidor

  • Academic study from life

  • Three studies of head

  • Gardens of La Granja

  • Elenita at the Beach, Asturias

  • Rocks and white boat, Javea

  • Maria

  • In the Garden

  • The Nereids

  • Clothilde at the Beach

  • Gray day on Valencia beach

  • The Young Yachtsman

  • Isla del Cap Marti, Javea

  • The Three Errazuriz Sisters

  • Swimmers, Javea

  • The river la Reina Valsain

  • Boy in Sea Foam

  • Cave at San Antonio, Javea

  • Resting Bacchante

  • Fisherman in Valencia

  • Boy with a ball

  • Children at the beach

  • Peeling Potatoes

  • Sad Inheritance

  • Maria at La Granja

  • Seated Nude

  • Reflections at the Cape, Javea

  • Fountain of Neptune, La Granja

  • Boat Builders

  • Bacchante

  • Boxing raisins, Javea

  • On the Beach, Valencia

  • Children on the seashore

  • Fishermen pull in the nets

  • The waterwheel, Javea

  • Summer

  • Portrait of photographer, Christian Franzen

  • Ropemakers

  • A Portrait of Basil Mundy

  • The suckling child

  • Shell in Jávea

  • Washing the Horse

  • The drinking jug

  • After the Bath

  • The happy day

  • The Net

  • Maria dressed as a Valencian peasant girl

  • On the Coast of Valencia

  • Valencia landscape

  • Seashore

  • The Yellow Tree, La Granja

  • Sea Idyll

  • The Beach at Biarritz (sketch)

  • San Martin Bridge at Toledo

  • The two sisters

  • Arrival of the Fishing Boats on the beach, Valencia

  • Stemming Raisins, Javea

  • Ex-voto

  • To the Water

  • The Shadow of Alcantara Bridge, Toledo

  • Valencian dance in an orange grove

  • Trafficking in human beings

  • Sailing Vessels on a Breezy Day, Valencia

  • Field in Asturias

  • Return From Fishing

  • Virgin Mary

  • Blessing the Boat

  • Looking for Shellfish

  • Gardens of the Alcázof Seville in Wintertime

  • Running along the beach

  • Setting sun in Biarritz

  • Boys on the Beach

  • Sea and rocks - Jávea

  • Grape Harvest

  • Portrait of Mr. Taft, President of the United States

  • Hall of the Ambassadors, Alhambra, Granada

  • Roads of Alijales, Toledo

  • Midday at Valencia beach

  • Watching the Fish

  • Portrait of King Alfonso XIII in the uniform of the hussars

  • Study for "The Comeback of the fisheries"

  • The Alcazar

  • Bulls in the Sea

  • The Small cove, Javea

  • Portrait of a Caballero

  • Farmhouse in Alcira

  • Fishing Nets

  • Peppers

  • Beaching the Boat (study)

  • Seascape

  • Italian Girl with Flowers

  • The beach of Biarritz

  • Valencian Fishwives

  • Guitplayers, Valencia

Views

Quotations: "I could not paint at all if I had to paint slowly. Every effect is so transient, it must be rapidly painted."

"The great difficulty with large canvases is that they should by right be painted as fast as a sketch. By speed only can you gain an appearance of fleeting effect. But to paint a three yard canvas with the same dispatch as one of ten inches is well-nigh impossible."

"If ever a painter wrought a miracle of illusion with brush and pigment that painter was Velazquez in his "Las Meninas" at the Prado in Madrid. Now, I have studied this picture with a lens, and what do I find? Why, that Velazquez got that marvelous atmospheric background by one broad sweep of his flowing brush, charged with thin color so thin that you can feel the very texture of the canvas through it. Nature, the sun itself, produces color effects on this same principle, but instantaneously. The impression of these evanescent visions is what we make desperate attempts to catch and fix by any means at hand. At such moments I am unconscious of materials, of style, of rules, of everything that intervenes between my perception and the object or idea perceived. No, mes amis, impressionism is not charlatanry, nor a formula, nor a school. I should say rather it is the bold resolve to throw all those things overboard."

Membership

Sorolla was a member of the Fine Art Academies of Paris, Lisbon and Valencia.

Connections

Sorolla was married to Clotilde García del Castillo. The couple gave birth to three children — Maria, Joaquin and Elena.

Father:

Joaquin Sorolla

Mother:

Concepción Bastida

child:

Maria Sorolla

child:

Joaquin Sorolla

child:

Elena Sorolla

Wife:

Clotilde García del Castillo

References

• Sorolla: The Masterworks
  2012
• Sorolla and the Paris Years
  2016
• Joaquin Sorolla
  2006
• Joaquín Sorolla and the Glory of Spanish Dress
  2013
• Sorolla and America
  2014