Joaquin Sorolla

Celebrated as a painter of light and hailed as a “modern of the moderns” by famed collector Duncan Phillips, Joaquín Sorolla (1863–1923) was one of the most successful artists of his time. This bright and colorful monograph reproduces 60 of the artist's key paintings, all of which attest to Sorolla's ravishing ability to capture the way light acts on a variety of surfaces, such as textiles, architecture, plants, the ocean and naked skin.

Spending his early years in his native Valencia, Madrid and Rome, Sorolla soon garnered the recognition of artists of similar merit such as John Singer Sargent and Anders Zorn. However, wider success would elude Sorolla until acclaimed exhibitions in London, New York and Chicago, held between 1908 and 1911. This addition to Polígrafa's Modern Masters series is an affordably priced and essential introduction to the brilliant work of one of Spain's greatest painters.

Containing over 300 reproductions of his most important works, Joaquín Sorolla is an essential survey on this ever-popular painter. It includes an in-depth essay by Blanca Pons-Sorolla, as well as an illustrated chronology.

Starting out as a painter of works intended for the salon and national exhibitions, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863–1923) very soon developed a style of open-air painting of his own which, though not connected stylistically with the Barbizon School, nevertheless pursued the same approach, as a result of which he came to be known as a Spanish impressionist painter.

He began to devote himself entirely to this style in 1900, painting landscapes, views of cities, studies of nature, seascapes and garden scenes in which he demonstrated his tremendous skill in capturing the effects of light. One such painting reproduced here, Sewing the Sail, exemplifies Sorolla's skill with light in the abstract. A pure white sail captures the shimmering pattern of the sun through garden plants. Excluding the plants, their pots, the seamstresses and the bright pastel-colored seaside landscape in the background, the sail on close examination betrays Sorolla's complex coloration—a precise mix of pinks, blues and yellows—that gives the viewer the impression of a simple white sail with sun and shade.