Joaquín Sorolla

Mademoiselle Cléry (purchased at the Paris 1906 exhibition)
Sale: Sotheby's, London, 14 June 1995, lot 66
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, Sorolla, 1906, no. 117

Bernardino de Pantorba, La vida y obra de Joaquín Sorolla, Madrid, 1970, no. 1511, catalogued (as El camino del mar (Valencia))
José Luis Díez & Javier Barón, (ed.), Joaquín Sorolla (1863-1923), (exh. cat.), Madrid, 2009  p. 32, fig. 10, illustrated

This painting is in very good condition, clean and ready to hang. The canvas has not been lined. There is a very faint, intermittent thin line of abrasion in the upper-right corner which is not visually distracting. Ultraviolet light reveals a handful of scattered small spots of retouching primarily in the foliage in the upper-left quadrant of the composition, and a circa 2 by 1cm repair to the right of the centre in the building (patched on the reverse). Some of the dark green pigments in the upper right appear to fluoresce under U.V. light, however these would certainly appear to be the artist's original and not retouching. Presented in a decorative gilt rococo-style frame, possibly dating from the 1906 Galerie Georges Petit exhibition. The number '117' on an old label on the lower left corner of the canvas also relates to this exhibition.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Painted in the vicinity of Alcira in early 1903. Sorolla, Clotilde and their children spent Christmas 1902 in Valencia with Clotilde's family, extending their stay there until early February. During that time Sorolla visited Alcira, some fifteen miles to the south of Valencia, where he painted a series of studies of orange trees including the present work.

Pure landscape formed a departure in his painting. Heretofore it had invariably formed a backdrop to a figurative scene, offering a context in which to consider the action being played out before the viewer. But in his Alcira pictures the dense greenery of the orange groves contrasted with the whitewashed walls of low buildings, or a farm house are presented as is: studies in the contrast of soft and hard forms, light and dark; lush vegetation versus bricks and mortar.

Sorolla had started to explore this aspect of his work in the summer of 1902, when he first travelled to Asturias. Visiting the painter Tomás García Sampedro, an old acquaintance from his days in Rome, and close too to his friend the law professor Rafael Altamira, he set up his easel at the mouth of the Nalón River near San Juan de la Arena. Absorbed by the contrasts to be found in the lush pastoral landscape, and fascinated in capturing the spatial and material differences between pastures, farmlands and woods he returned there in the spring of 1903 and 1904. 

His interest in this theme - looking at Spain's interior and depicting its countryside, subsequently developed into the series of gardens and city views that he painted to great effect between 1905 and 1910. Subjects included sweeping panoramas of Toledo and Segovia, and views of the gardens of the Royal Palace at La Granja de San Ildefonso and those of the Alcázar in Seville (fig. 1). The present work was shown at the Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, in 1906, Sorolla's first major one-man show outside Spain, and the exhibition that confirmed his status as Spain's leading painter of the period.