Joaquín Sorolla: Spanish Sunlight in London

The Return from Fishing (from the Wikimedia Commons)

For the past few months there has been more sunlight in one room at the National Gallery than in the whole of the rest of London.  It is light that has to be squinted into: dazzling Mediterranean sunshine, undiminished for being more than a hundred years old.  It drenched the coast of Valencia at the turn of the last century, yet its intensity was captured again and again by the Spanish artist Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863–1923).  This year, the National Gallery has housed the first major exhibition of his works in London for over a century: 'Sorolla: Master of Light'.

Clotilde and Elena on the Rocks (from <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bastida_clotilde-elena.jpg>)

I cannot remember when I was last so astonished by the works of a single painter.   I am only a layman, but it seems to me that Sorolla was extraordinarily gifted, and that he achieved the Impressionists' ambition: to capture light and motion, at least as well as any other artist of that movement.  It is from Monet's own estimation of Sorolla, as the 'Master of Light', that the exhibition's title comes.  Indeed, he seemed to be able to depict everything that light does: 'Never has a brush contained so much sun', declared the critic Henri Rochefort.  In a single picture he could record its punishingly blinding intensity on red cliffs, and then the gentler glare of its second- and third-hand reflections, which softly and bluishly appear in his wife's and daughter's white clothes in a shady foreground.  He could recreate its bold invasion of a raisin-packing warehouse with a slab of exactly the right shade of yellow-white; he could depict its delicate illumination of a woman's eye-lashes; he could paint its pearly coolness in church.  In vain does the viewer try to see how it all works by getting right up close to the picture: everywhere there are dashes and patches of colour which seem audacious or even rash, but which turn out to be exactly right, unerringly true.  The brush-strokes are deft and instinctive and simply beyond technique or instruction. They are strokes of genius.

'Sewing the Sail' (from <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cosiendo_la_vela.jpg>)

Yet, to my shame, Sorolla was completely unknown to me before I heard (via Westminster Cathedral's magazine 'Oremus') about this exhibition.  He is well-known in Spain, but I cannot understand why he is not better known in Britain.  His paintings ache with reality.  As the curators put it, 'his pictures radiate the dazzle of sunlight on water, the heat of a sultry afternoon and the force of a stiff sea breeze'.  Amid the glittering sunlight, you can almost hear the paintings: the violent smack and slap of a billowing sail, the shrieks of children playing, the slosh and roar of the sea.  In one of the most stunning tableaux, 'Sewing the Sail', depicting a family mending the sail by which they earn their livelihood, the stunningly realistic rendering of so mundane an object as a terracotta vase actually made me feel slightly dizzy, to say nothing of the effortlessly lush and generous tumble of the sail's canvas.  His eye was almost journalistic — indeed, one of the pictures shows his wife holding a camera — and many of the pictures depict a split-second, an instant, the twinkling of an eye, as if they were photographs.  They are often in the gerund, with their titles like 'Sewing the Sail' and 'Packing Raisins'.  And he painted in the field, even building wooden platforms out into the sea to stand on with his easel.  Some of the details that he chooses to pick out are almost heart-stopping.  In 'Packing Raisins' the ear-ring of a young woman in the foreground can just be glimpsed: on closer inspection it turns out to be a tiny but unmistakeable point of brilliant yellow.  Somehow he could see the tiny particulars that go to make a place, a person or even a single moment — an impression — distinctive.

'Mother': Sorolla's wife Clotilde and youngest daughter Elena.
(from <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Museo_Sorolla_-_00324_-_Madre.jpg>)

His paintings ache with a reality other than the visual, too.  Beauty runs through his paintings: human beauty, and human dignity.  All through his paintings Sorolla affirms the nobility of his subjects.  There is his affection for his family: he plainly loved his wife Clotilde deeply, and his portraits of her depict a woman of shocking beauty.  In 'Mother', showing his wife and his newborn daughter Elena swathed in soft bed-linen, he created a picture 'overflowing with tenderness'.  He also loved the landscape and traditional costumes of his country: the Hispanic Society in America commissioned some enormous murals depicting Spanish culture, the 'Vision of Spain', and he spent many years travelling around and working on this project.  And some of his other subjects, too, have a journalistic element (perhaps, if he had been born in our age, he would have been a photojournalist).  His portraits of ordinary life and ordinary working folk, and even social commentary, such as a monumental depiction of a dying fisherman, as if he were Christ being taken down from the Cross,  entitled, searingly, 'And they still say fish is expensive'.  Then there is 'Sad Inheritance', an enormous picture of crippled boys being taken by a monk to bathe in the sea.   The dignity of his subjects, even amid suffering, poverty and evildoing, runs through all his work.

It seems to me that he had all the gifts of the true artist: the eye that sees, the heart that senses, and the hand that creates.  This is what the art of the twentieth-century could have given itself to.  Observation, feeling, technique, in the service of truth and beauty.  I have needed two visits of over two hours each to feel I have done Sorolla's works any kind of justice.  I know this is perhaps rather short notice, but if any readers are able to get there to see the exhibition before it closes on the 7th July, I would heartily recommend it.

'Strolling along the Seashore' (from <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joaquín_Sorolla_y_Bastida_-_Strolling_along_the_Seashore_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg>)