Joaquín Sorolla

José Sarasa, Paris; thence by descent
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Bernardino de Pantorba, La vida y la obra de Joaquín Sorolla, Madrid, 1970, p. 176, no. 1258, catalogued
Joaquín Sorolla. 1863-1923, exh. cat., Museo del Prado, Madrid, 2009, p. 217, fig. 133

Apart from a very fine horizontal hairline crack emanating from the upper-left edge, the panel is in good condition, flat and even. There are no signs of retouching visible under ultraviolet light through an even varnish. Apart from a few scattered and faint frame indentations along the extreme edges, this work is in good condition, with rich tones and a strong surface. Held in an elaborate carved wood black and gold painted frame.
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Painted in 1892 the present panel is a sketch for the large scale canvas of the same title that was awarded the first class medal at the National Fine Arts Exhibition in Madrid of the same year (fig. 1).

A commentary on the plight of the dispossessed, the subject is a young girl who has been shamed into killing her illegitimate child. Her dishonour discovered, Sorolla depicts her handcuffed in a third class railway carriage being taken by two Civil Guards to the court where she is to be tried.

The subject derived from Sorolla's witness of a similar scene on the train that he took from Valencia to Madrid. His decision to work up the subject into a large scale composition for submission to the National Fine Arts Exhibition chimed with a new interest that he and his contemporaries took in the depiction of urban genre scenes, and conformed to the current appetite for social realist subjects.   

Sorolla's title for the painting refers to the heroine in Goethe's Faust who drowned the baby that she bore following her liaison with the eponymous doctor. Sorolla's use of a literary allusion in the title both universalised the specific and wretched circumstances of the particular young girl depicted, and at the same time highlighted the social injustice at the heart of modern society. 

Fig. 1: Joaquín Sorolla, Otra Margarita, 1892, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St Louis, Missouri