SPANISH ART - Arte Español: Joaquin Sorolla Bastida

Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida 1863 --1923) was a Spanish painter born in Valencia, Spain. He excelled in the painting of portraits, landscapes, and monumental works of social and historical themes. His most typical works are characterized by a dexterous representation of people and the landscape under the sunlight of his native land. In 1888, Sorolla married Clotilde García del Castillo, whom he had first met in 1879. His first striking success was achieved with Another Marguerite (1892), which was awarded a gold medal at the National Exhibition in Madrid, then first prize at the Chicago International Exhibition, where it was acquired and subsequently donated to the Washington University Museum in St. Louis, Missouri. Although formal portraiture was not Sorolla's genre of preference, because it tended to restrict his creative appetites and could reflect his lack of interest in his subjects nut the acceptance of portrait commissions proved profitable, and the portrayal of his family was irresistible. A series of portraits produced in the United States in 1909, was capped by the Portrait of Mr. Taft, President of the United States, painted at the White House, and suggestive of convivial sessions between painter and president. The appearance of sunlight could be counted to rouse his interest, and it was outdoors where he found his ideal portrait settings. Thus, not only did his daughter pose standing in a sun-dappled landscape for María en La Granja (1907). The conceit reaches its high point in My Wife and Daughters in the Garden (1910), in which the idea of traditional portraiture gives way to the sheer fluid delight of a painting constructed with thick passages of color, Sorolla's love of family and merging sunlight. Early in 1911, Sorolla visited the United States for a second time, and exhibited 152 new paintings at the Saint Louis Art Museum and 161 at the Art Institute of Chicago. Later that year Sorolla met Archie Huntington in Paris and signed a contract to paint a series of oils about life in Spain. These 14 magnificent murals, installed to this day in the Hispanic Society of America building in Manhattan, range from 12 to 14 feet in height, and total 227 feet in length. The major commission of his career, it would dominate the later years of Sorolla's life. The painting Provinces of Spain despite the immensity of the canvases, Sorolla painted all but one outdoors, and travelled to the specific places to paint them: Navarre, Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, Elche, Seville, Andalusia, Extremadura, Galicia, Guipuzcoa, Castile, Leon, and Ayamonte, at each site models posed in local costume. Each mural celebrated the landscape and culture of its region, panoramas composed of throngs of laborers and locals. By 1917 he was, by his own admission, exhausted. He completed the final panel by July 1919. Sorolla suffered a stroke in 1920, while painting a portrait in his garden in Madrid. Paralyzed for over three years, he died on 10 August 1923. The Sorolla Room, housing the oils Provinces of Spain at the Hispanic Society of America, opened to the public in 1926. The room closed for remodeling in 2008, and the murals toured museums in Spain for the first time. The Sorolla Room reopened in 2010, with the murals on permanent display. After his death, Sorolla's widow, Clotilde García del Castillo, left many of his paintings to the Spanish people. Many of his works were exhibited around the world. A new exhibition titled Sorolla & America explores Sorolla's unique relationship with the United States in the early twentieth century. This summer the exhibition opened at the San Diego Museum of Art, California.