Sorolla, Master of Light: London National Gallery discovers Spanish Impressionism

LET’S be honest: how many of you could name one single Spanish Impressionist painter? Monet, Sargent, Rénoir, Délacroix immediately spring to mind when you picture the pastel-coloured, light-reflecting landscapes of post-Enlightenment Europe; classical, Renaissance, cubist and surrealist artists from Spain are not hard to list (Goya, El Greco, Dalí, Picasso, Velázquez, and so on). But Impressionists?

Benlliure and Sorolla are two of the greatest masters of this era and both are from the Valencia area, and were considered some of the most iconic artists of the so-called Generation of ’98, a cultural movement which emerged during a time of financial, political and social crisis at the end of the 19^th century. The former’s house, complete with the whole family’s works on display, is in Valencia city, and the latter’s eponymous museum is in Madrid, the capital of the region where he died at just 60 years of age in 1923.

Despite his short time on our planet, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida spent it wisely – in less time than it takes a modern-day human to be born, educated, work and retire, he’d churned out over 2,200 paintings, meaning that the newly-opened exhibition at the London National Gallery, sizeable though it is with 58 of his works on the walls, is only a fraction of what he produced over the turn of two centuries.

And although Sorolla was as famous as his French contemporaries, you’ll be hard-pushed to find anything of his on show in any public exhibition in the UK – until now.

Yet the London Tate Gallery, at least, has a strong Valencian connection: its former director, Vicente Todolí, is from the region, although he’s now back on Spanish shores and working on his future botanical garden in the village of Palmera (Valencia province, between Oliva and Gandia).

Sorolla has, in fact, been the subject of an exhibition in London before – the last time his works were present in the British capital was at the Grafton Galleries in 1908. And as he was still alive and aged just 45 at the time, Sorolla opened, organised and presented it himself.

Back then, the gallery advertised his collection as being by ‘the world’s best living painter’, although we suspect the sales slogan was not devised by Sorolla himself, who was rather humbler in his character and had to work hard for recognition, tirelessly creating pictures and sending them to competitions and galleries in the hope of something being displayed.

Had he listened to his uncle rather than his heart, Sorolla would have been a locksmith by trade, like the man who, along with his aunt Isabel, brought him and his sister Eugenia up after they were orphaned when Sorolla was two by a cholera epidemic. Sometimes, following your parents’ or guardians’ advice doesn’t work out for the best; Spain, the world and, now, the National Gallery, would have lost a profound talent to a manual trade.

After not achieving much recognition for his works through his own attempts, Joaquín Sorolla decided to see whether he would fare better by following already-set trends: he studied the Renaissance and Baroque paintings of Velázquez and Goya at Madrid’s El Prado Museum, copying their classical, lifelike and detailed biblical scenes and human form – this is a style he revisited now and again in the future, examples of which can now be found in the third hall of the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery and include a portrait of US painter Ralph Clarkson and Desnudo de mujer (‘Nude of a woman’), based upon the more famous La Venus del Espejo (‘Venus in the mirror’).

But what Sorolla is best-known for now is his startling ability to capture the reflection of light on colour, adding a stunningly-real three-dimensional slant to his trademark subjects: local scenes, beaches, fishermen, people paddling in the sea, coastal landscapes. He often included his family in these – his wife Clotilde Castillo and their three children, María, Elena and Joaquín – some of which can be found in the fourth hall of the London exhibition; Paseo a Orillas del Mar (‘Stroll along the seashore’) and La Siesta being two of these. His Niños Bañándose Entre Rocas (‘Children bathing among the rocks’) famously featured María, Elena and Joaquín when they were little and is set in Jávea, northern Alicante province – an area Sorolla fell in love with during a visit in 1896 which Clotilde had opted not to join him on.

In a letter home to her, Sorolla wrote: “This, Xàbia, has everything I wish for and more, and if you saw what I had in front of my casita, you would not be able to find the words to extoll its virtues; I am dumbfounded with the emotion that still dominates me.

“It has all the craziness of a dream, the same effect as though I lived in the sea on a great ship…you would be so happy, you would enjoy it so much! This is the place I have always dreamed of, sea and mountain, but what a sea!”

A whole summer’s worth of Sorolla’s works featured scenes from Jávea, where the idea of opening a small museum in tribute to him has been floated – even though the most famous of these scenes, posthumously titled Cap Martí, Jávea has since turned out to be of the Peñón del Cuervo rock off the coast of Málaga.

Shore scenes from the regions of Andalucía, Valencia and the Basque Country have found their way across the globe – El Retorno de la Pesca (‘The return of the catch’), featuring fishing boats, has been loaned to the National Gallery by Paris’ Musée d’Orsay, and Cosiendo la Vela (‘Sewing the sail’) is the cover photo for the London exhibition and has been borrowed from the Ca’ Pesaro Modern Art Museum in Venice. Others have come from New York, Madrid has, of course, supplied plenty, and a significant minority are from private collections.

The exhibition, fittingly titled Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light, is described as ‘a rare opportunity to see the most complete’ collection of his works outside of Spain and the presentation refers to his ‘genre scenes of Spanish life’, ‘vivid seascapes’, ‘garden views’ and ‘iridescent canvases’, but it would take a marketing genius to accurately convey the sheer beauty of this underrated painter’s splendid works: you can feel the sun shining on you from the canvas, see the water shimmering, feel the splashing of the waves. Sorolla may not be alive to present what is only his second exhibition in London, but his works do, indeed, feel strikingly alive and surprisingly tangible.

If you’re in or near London or are inspired to visit it purely on the basis of the exhibition, you can catch it until July 7 inclusive – tickets cost £18 on weekends and £16 on weekdays, or £2 less if you buy them online.