JOAQUÍN SOROLLA | Niños en el mar. Playa de Valencia (Children in the Sea, Valencia Beach)

Private Collection, USA (acquired in 1909)
Sale: Sotheby Parke-Bernet, New York, 21 March 1947, lot 314
Sala Parés, Barcelona (acquired in 1948)
Francisco Samaranch, Barcelona (acquired from the above)
Francisco Samaranch Jr, Barcelona (son of the above)
Juan Antonio Samaranch, Barcelona (brother of the above)
Sala Parés, Barcelona (by 1981)
Private Collection, United States (acquired from the above in 1981)

New York, The Hispanic Society of America; Buffalo, Fine Arts Academy; Boston, Copley Society: Paintings by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida Exhibited by the Hispanic Society of America, 1909, no. 301 (New York); no. 170 (Buffalo & Boston), illustrated in the catalogues
Barcelona, Sala Parés, Exposición de cuadros del gran pintor Joaquín Sorolla, con motivo del XXV aniversario de su muerte, 1948, no. 17
Madrid, Dirección General de Bellas Artes, Casón del Buen Retiro, Joaquín Sorolla. Primer centenario de su nacimiento (1863-1963), 1963
Barcelona, Sala Parés, Exposición de Homenaje al pintor Joaquín Sorolla, con motivo del cincuentenario de su muerte, 1973, no. 23, illustrated in the catalogue
Valencia, IVAM Centre Julio González; New York, IBM Gallery; St Louis, Art Museum; San Diego, Museum of Art: Sorolla, 1988-89, no. 46, illustrated in the catalogue
New Mexico, Albuquerque Museum & Dallas, Meadows Museum: Prelude to Spanish Modernism: Fortuny to Picasso, 2005-6, no. 42, illustrated in the catalogue
Meadows Museum, Dallas (on loan 2004-2011) 
Dallas, Meadows Museum; San Diego, The San Diego Museum of Art; Madrid, Fundación Mapfre, Sorolla and America, 2013-2014, no. 38 & no. 44, illustrated in the catalogue

Aureliano de Beruete, C. Mauclair, H. Rochefort, L. Williams, E.L. Cary, J.G. Huneker, C. Brinton and W.E.B. Sterkweather, Eight Essays on Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, New York, 1909, vol. II, no. 301, illustrated
Goya, August 1963, no. 35, p. 36
Bernardino de Pantorba, La vida y obra de Joaquín Sorolla, Madrid, 1970, p. 193, no. 1674, catalogued, p. 85, illustrated
Edmund Peel, The Painter Joaquín Sorolla, London, 1989, p. 157, no. 46, illustrated
Blanca Pons-Sorolla, Joaquín Sorolla. Vida y obra, Madrid, 2001, p. 298, no. 180 & 304
Blanca Pons-Sorolla, Joaquín Sorolla, London, 2005, p. 187, no. 91, catalogued & illustrated

Painted in 1908, Sorolla's evocation of childhood innocence in Children in the Sea, Valencia Beach, is one of his freshest and most iconic beach scenes. The spontaneity of their playful actions is a fundamental element of the works completed during this summer in Valencia and is central to Sorolla’s most successful compositions from this period such Running along the beach (featuring in the National Gallery’s retrospective), a painting which shares an additional parallel with Children in the sea due to the repeated use of the boy who gazes out at the viewer. As the young boy standing in the foreground shades his eyes to look out quizically at the viewer, his play mates frolic in the waves behind. Indifferent to any onlookers they jump the whites of the waves, and lounge in the shallows. In the distance on the high horizon line is a fishing boat under full sail.   Sorolla records the children's innocent activity with extraordinary painterly fluency. He defines their energy bursts with short staccato brush strokes, capturing their activities with a masterful economy of means. To define the sea longer and broader strokes of paint criss-cross the picture surface. Painting under the full force of the Mediterranean sun, Sorolla evokes the glare of the light in the water that glistens on the children's bodies, the brilliance of their reflections, and the distinctive action of the foreground boy. In the background the full sails of the fishing boat suggest the force of the wind, a reality that is also evident in the occasional particles of sand that became mixed with the paint and which still adhere to the picture surface.  As well as using the light to optimum effect in his work, it was the spontaneity that Sorolla evoked in his compositions, that appealed so strongly to the public imagination.

Sorolla's exhibitions in France, Germany and England gave his work extraordinary exposure across Europe, but it was his meeting with the American millionaire Archer M. Huntington in London that proved to be his most influential contact: Huntington invited Sorolla to stage the inaugural exhibition of his newly constructed Hispanic Society of America in New York at the beginning of the following year. Buoyed up by this invitation Sorolla embarked on his summer painting campaign at Valencia with renewed vigour. The resultant series of works, of which Children in the Sea, Valencia Beach is a prime example, show Sorolla working at the height of his powers, wielding his brush with supreme confidence and completing some of his most successful compositions of figures on the beach. The present work was one of some 350 pictures that Sorolla exhibited in New York from 4 February – 8 March 1909. The response to the exhibition was overwhelming. During one month it attracted nearly 170,000 visitors, 20,000 copies of the exhibition catalogue were sold, and on the last day alone nearly 30,000 descended on the Hispanic Society to catch the show before it closed. Sales for Sorolla topped 150 works (including the present painting), and on the strength of the exhibition Sorolla received a series of prestigious portrait commissions.

Writing to his mother Huntington described the success of the exhibition in the following terms: 'Everywhere the air was full of the miracle. People quoted figures of attendance. There was eternal talk of 'sunlight'. Nothing like it had ever happened in New York. Ohs and Ahs stained the floors. Automobiles blocked the streets. Orders for portraits poured in. Photographs were sold in unheard of numbers. And through it all the little creator sat surprised, overwhelmed yet simple and without vanity, while I translated to him the rising tide of press enthusiasm. And Clotilde his small Valencian wife, with the pained drawn face of those who dwell with the great, folded her hands meekly and drank of the tide of glory tremulously, nervously smiling, bewildered and happy, as more than a hundred people crowded into the small building to pay tribute to her husband. And then it was all over; the doors were closed and the packing began, for the pictures must soon start upon their pilgrimages to other galleries.'  (quoted in Blanca Pons Sorolla, Joaquín Sorolla, London, 2004, p. 204).  



The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Blanca Pons Sorolla, who will be including it in the forthcoming Sorolla catalogue raisonné (BPS 1910).