Joaquin Sorolla

Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida was one of the most beloved and appreciated artists of his day. In 1908, he was hailed as “the greatest living painter in the world” for his extraordinary technique and the pleasing nature of his subjects, rising to a level of fame that very soon went well beyond national borders.
Joaquín Sorolla: Painter of Light recounts the extraordinary stylistic development of this ambitious and determined painter, who made art his reason for living. Sorolla’s magnificent and passionate artistic journey was one of joy, suffering, satisfaction and research. His main pursuit and innovation in painting was the study of light, rigorously captured from real life and en plein air, gradually evolving into an immediate, spontaneous and sophisticated language.
Joaquín Sorolla (1863–1923) was born in Valencia, Spain, a city to which he returned throughout his life. His fame as a painter was established by 1890, with exhibitions in Munich, Paris, Chicago, Vienna, Venice and Buenos Aires. By 1900, he was considered as the most famous of all living Spanish artists; his work paved the transition from Impressionism to Picasso.

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.