Sorolla 2

Here are pictures that show Sorolla as a mature painter. His often huge paintings glow with tremendous light and are full of color. I am going to throw out a brief bio of Sorolla tonight. Some of you are very highly trained painters who know this stuff already, but others who read the blog are not. I want to make sure that those who haven't been exposed to Sorolla know who he was. If they haven't seen his art they must be pretty wowed.

images from artrenewal.org

Joaquin Sorolla (1863-1923) Orphaned as a small child and raised by his aunt and uncle studied art in Madrid, at the Prado then at the Spanish Academy in Rome. He then moved to Paris and feel under the spell of Bastien LePage, remember, I showed you one of those of Joan of Arc about a week ago.
He returned to Madrid and gradually became the most recognized of Spanish painters winning prizes at the salon and garnering important portrait commissions, of which he was not terribly fond.

The painting above, Sad Inheritance won the Grand Prix and a medal of honor at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1900. This made him internationally famous and freed him to do the kind of work he really wanted and an example of this is below. He became a painter of regional Spanish scenes. Often these were huge and painted on location. Sometimes he painted outside on canvasses so large they had to be secured with stakes and guy lines like a circus tent.


Sorolla painted a portrait of then President Taft at the White House in 1909. He also painted King Alphonso of Spain in 1907. The Hispanic Society in New York commissioned Sorolla to paint a series of enormous plein air paintings of the 14 regions of Spain. The paintings together were over 220 feet long. They are on display there today. This major commission occupied the last of his productive career and were finished in 1919. After their completion the exhausted Sorolla suffered a stroke in 1920, paralyzed, he died three years later.