Joaquín Sorolla

Justo Bou (acquired from the artist)
Maria Bauzá, viuda de Rodríguez
Acquired by the parents of the present owner from the above circa 1955-60

Fernando Jiménez Placer, La pintura y la escultura españolas de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX, Barcelona, 1944, vol. XV, p. 719, illustrated
Bernardino de Pantorba, La vida y la obra de Joaquín Sorolla, estudio biográfico y crítico, Madrid, 1953, no. 1793, catalogued

This condition report has been provided by Hamish Dewar, Hamish Dewar Ltd. Fine Art Conservation, 14 Masons Yard, Duke Street, St James's, London SW1Y 6BU. Structural Condition The canvas is unlined on what would certainly appear to be the original wooden keyed stretcher. This is ensuring an even and secure structural support and there is no evidence of any structural intervention in the past. There are some very fine lines of craquelure which are stable and not visually distracting. These are most evident in the blue pigments of the water on the left of the composition. Paint surface The paint surface could benefit from surface cleaning as I suspect there might be a thin film of surface dirt. Inspection under ultra-violet light shows just two very small areas in the lower left corner of the composition which measure approximately 1 and 0.5 cm in diameter. These would appear to be partially retouched losses and it should stressed that they are very small. As is often the case with Sorolla, some pigments do fluoresce unevenly but I am confident that these are the artist's original pigments rather than later retouching. One such area is just beside the girl's right foot where the shadows fluoresce but are clearly the original material. Summary The painting would therefore appear to be in excellent and stable condition and the only work that might be considered is surface cleaning.
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Painted in 1915 but signed and dated in 1917, the present work is one of a select number of oils that Sorolla executed on La Malvarrosa beach at Valencia that year. Describing the series Blanca Pons Sorolla notes: 'There are not many, but they are of great quality.'  (Blanca Pons Sorolla, Joaquín Sorolla, London, 2005, p. 276).    

The striking spontaneity of Sorolla's depiction of the young girl running into the sea, the boy lying on the shore and the small child playing in the waves is matched by the artist's dramatic use of foreshortening to eliminate the horizon line, the reduction of all other pictorial elements to bare essentials: sea, sand and boats, and his audacious palette. 

Sorolla's time in Valencia in the summer of 1915 provided a welcome respite from the major project that had been occupying the majority of his time since 1911, namely the commission from Archer M. Huntington to paint a series of monumental canvases on the theme of the Vision of Spain for the Hispanic Society of America, New York. This massive series of canvases celebrating Spanish regional life necessitated that Sorolla travel extensively throughout Spain to paint the local peoples and record their customs. Returning in the summers to the city in which he had grown up and where he could relax with his family by the sea offered him a much needed break from Huntington's mammoth task as well as the opportunity to turn his attention to more liberating subjects. 

Over the preceding fifteen years Sorolla had painted a series of increasingly spontaneous and ever more luminous scenes of children on the beach at Valencia. The freedom of execution and liveliness of spirit that these works exhibit are qualities that go to the heart of Sorolla's aesthetic and account for the artist's enduring popularity. Sorolla's inclusion of children into his compositions in the early 1900s tended to make their presence subservient to the main social realist message (fig. 1). As the decade wore on, however, children came to play an ever more central role, diminishing or excluding other elements, in particular the fishermen and oxen that had been the dominant feature of his work during the 1890s (fig. 2).

Sorolla's increasing use of children as subject matter was inspired by his growing family and the importance that he attached to domestic life, not least as a response to his own upbringing: he had been orphaned as a child and raised by relatives. His children María, Joaquín and Elena were born in 1890, 1892 and 1895 respectively, and although other than in family portraits they did not necessarily model for him for specific compositions, nonetheless in different guises his three offspring seem to inhabit his beach scenes in spirit (fig. 3). A trio of children of varying ages crop up in a number of paintings, the eldest often being a girl. In the case of the present work, however, according to Blanca Pons Sorolla the central figure was modelled on Elena, Sorolla's youngest child. 

The freedom of painterly expression with which Sorolla captures the childrens' lack of self consciousness belies his academic training. Sorolla studied first in the Escuela de Bellas Artes, Valencia and subsequently in Rome from 1885-88, having been awarded a grant by the Diputación de Valencia. Coincident with the demands of his formal study, however, Sorolla took a keen interest in the styles and techniques of his contemporaries abroad, notably in France. From Rome Sorolla travelled to Paris in the spring of 1885 where he visited the Salon des Artistes Français, and discovered the work of Naturalist painters Jules Bastien-Lepage and Adolf von Menzel. He was in Paris again in 1889 to visit the Exposition Universelle and once more in June 1891, when he may well have caught the end of Claude Monet's exhibition of his Haystacks series at Galerie Durand-Ruel. 

Recognition of Sorolla's own painterly abilities within France followed swiftly thereafter. In 1895 La Vuelta de la pesca was purchased by the French State. In 1900 Triste herencia was awarded the Grand Prix at the Exposition Universelle and Monet himself heralded Sorolla as 'the master of light'. In 1906 Sorolla launched his first major one man show in Paris at Galerie Georges Petit, staying in the French capital for its entirety, and doubtless visiting during his stay the XVIe Exhibition of the Société Nationale de Beaux-Arts at the Grand Palais.  
 
It was as a result of such exposure to French contemporary painting that Sorolla was able to discover the sense of movement and the increasingly startling colours that would become such a feature of his work. Recalling his development Sorolla reflected: 'How long it has taken me to define this art. Twenty years! Up to the time I painted the picture which hangs in the Luxembourg [La vuelta de la pesca] the ideal was not revealed to me in its entirety. It was a laborious process, but a methodical one. Gradually the hesitations were ironed out; but not all of a sudden.' (quoted by Carmen Gracia in The Painter Joaquín Sorolla, exh. cat., London 1989, p. 38).

Sorolla's consummate mastery of painterly technique was matched by his absolute urge to weald the brush. Blanca Pons Sorolla has noted: '....[Sorolla] simply could not survive without painting... As Sorolla himself would say: "I paint because I love painting. For me it is an immense pleasure"' (Blanca Pons Sorolla, p. 276). The fruits of his labour - his compulsion and his passion over many years - are clearly evident in the present work: in the bravura brushstrokes, the liquid paint surface and his striking use of mauves and purples both in the sea and in the shadow of the main figure.

As well as the influence of contemporary painting, however, it was his longstanding interest in photography and photographic techniques that also liberated Sorolla from the suffocation of retardaire academic traditions, and which played such a decisive role in the development of his compositions. In the present work the pose of the young girl, frozen in action as she runs into the water, the seemingly arbitrary positioning of the boats in the sea, the raised position of the observer to eliminate the horizon and the cropping of the edges of the canvas are clearly snapshot-like in their conception.

Sorolla had been introduced to the compositional opportunities that photography offered the artist when growing up in Valencia. At the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Valencia Sorolla became friends with the son of a local photographer Antonio García Peris. Impressed by Sorolla's work and aware of his straitened circumstances García offered to pay for the cost of much of his schooling in return for Sorolla working in his photography laboratory, retouching photographs. There Sorolla fell in love with García's second daughter, Clotilde, whom he married in 1888, a union that ensured continuing close ties with García and his photographic business through until the photographer's death thirty years later. Again and again Sorolla refers to photography and its influence on him in his work, either obliquely in his compositions or very openly such as in the portraits of photographers with whom he was acquainted that he painted during his life.

Fig. 1. Joaquín Sorolla, Después del baño (After the Bath), 1902, Private Collection

Fig. 2. Joaquín Sorolla, La hora del baño (The Bathing Hour), 1904, Private Collection

Fig. 3. Joaquín Sorolla, Corriendo por la playa (Running along the Beach), 1908