Sun, Sea and Sand -- Sorolla at the National Gallery

In the paintings of Joaquín Sorolla, you can feel the searing heat and the glaring sun of a Spanish summer.

A century ago, Sorolla was Spain's greatest living painter, an artist who won many prizes and made a lot of money too, particularly in the United States. He didn't go down quite so well in Britain when he was alive, but now he's back, in a big and apparently very popular show at the National Gallery in London: Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light.

There are several sides to Sorolla's work: He's perhaps best known for his impressionistic views of the Spanish coast and the people on it, though social realism also makes up a large part of his oeuvre, and he was a skilled portraitist.

Sorolla was born in Valencia in 1863 and repeatedly returned to the coastal city, drawn by the motifs it offered. Sun, sea and sand are the ingredients of some of Sorolla's most striking paintings, exemplified by this 1909 snapshot (we're into the age of the Kodak camera here) of his wife Clotilde and elder daughter María Strolling along the Seashore in Valencia. Their white dresses glow in the late-afternoon light, while Clotilde's veil is whipped from her face by the breeze. And as if Sorolla hasn't quite got the shot right with his new state-of-the-art pocket camera, the top of his wife's hat is cut off while a broad band of beach fills the foreground.

It's a festival of white, and white is often a predominant colour in Sorolla's canvases. In the first room of this exhibition, we're introduced to the painter and his family, and the most eye-catching picture here is this one, Mother, depicting Clotilde and the couple's newborn third child, Elena, cocooned in fluffy white bedding so soft you feel you could dive into it. The artist returned to the painting after several years to have the mother and baby facing each other, intensifying the maternal bond.

Next to it, there's a rather different view of Clotilde on a bed. Female Nude sees her from behind on a shimmering pink satin bedspread. It's an evocation of that great Spanish master Diego Velázquez's Rokeby Venus, which Sorolla had seen in Britain. We see throughout this show references by Sorolla to Velázquez as well as to Goya in terms of subject matter and palette of greys, blacks and creams. A 1907 essay on Sorolla was entitled Grandson of Velázquez, Son of Goya.

In the second room, the focus is on Sorolla's depiction in the final decade of the 19th century of social themes: concerns for the poor, the downtrodden, the workers. The treatment is sometimes full of light, as in Sewing the Sail, where the white expanse of the fishing boat's sail is the dominant aspect of the painting. The treatment of the light is extraordinary. The women sewing are largely protected from the blazing sun beating down outside -- you can sense it through the doorway in the background -- but that glare is still tangible, the dappling caught on the thread being used by the woman nearest to us.

We've had a fair bit of bright white, and now it's time for the dark. Another Marguerite! reproduces a scene Sorolla witnessed on a train. A woman, in handcuffs, is being taken for trial accused of murdering her child. Sorolla recreated it by getting his models to pose in a real railway carriage. The title is a reference to a character from Goethe's Faust who was seduced by Faust and in desperation killed her illegitimate child.

One of Sorolla's most famous works along these lines comes from the Prado in Madrid. And They Still Say Fish Is Expensive! shows a young sailor on a fishing boat who's been badly injured in an accident being attended to by two other, much older crewmates, one of whom attempts to stanch the flow of blood from his chest with a rag while the other holds him up by the shoulders. Light falls from the hatch, illuminating the young main's pale body in a pose that recalls depictions of Christ taken down from the cross. These are powerful images that Sorolla was able to summon up.

Sorolla's portraits show a broader range of influences than just Velázquez and Goya; there's Singer Sargent, for example, Whistler, and rather unexpectedly, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Some are highly polished, such as one of The Painter Aureliano de Beruete, but others are painted loosely and rapidly, like this one of Clotilde in a Black Dress. 

It's no surprise to learn that Sorolla painted 4,000 pictures over the course of a 40-year career.

But let's get back to those beach scenes that are so characteristic of the artist. These were the images that became so popular on the art market, especially in the US. In Boys on the Beach, Sorolla was able to capture the sheen of the sun on wet bodies and their reflections in the damp sand using long brushstrokes.

That's a relatively static image, but there's much more movement in Running along the Beach, Valencia, with its breakers and the billowing beach dresses of the two girls. It's so full of energy.

In the first decade of the 20th century, Sorolla achieved huge success with exhibitions in Paris and New York, but a 1908 show in London was a bit of a flop in terms of sales. He won a prestigious contract to provide a 70-metre cycle of paintings for the library of the Hispanic Society of America in New York, and for eight years crisscrossed Spain in search of landscapes and figures for these. One room at the National Gallery is devoted to these pictures, and we found it the least interesting part of the exhibition. There's a slight sense of being on a coach tour of tourist traps, with the next photo-opportunity of the natives in traditional costume coming up shortly.

A room of Sorolla's landscapes also falls a bit short; he seemed to echo the French Impressionists, but a couple of decades late, when painters elsewhere in Europe had moved on to new ways of seeing things. Perhaps the most enticing of these landscapes is one of The Breakwater, San Sebastián, captured swiftly amid an approaching storm.

In the end, though, it's the pictures that are full of light that are the ones that stick in the memory longest from this Sorolla show. Enjoy the heat of a Spanish summer at the National Gallery without fear of sunburn.

Practicalities

Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light is on at the National Gallery until July 7. Opening hours are 1000-1800 every day, with lates on Fridays until 2100. Standard admission is £16 Monday to Friday and £18 at the weekend, but it's £2 cheaper if you book online, which you can do here. The National Gallery is on the north side of Trafalgar Square, just a couple of minutes from Charing Cross or Leicester Square stations on the rail and Underground networks.

Images

Joaquín Sorolla, Strolling along the Seashore, 1909, Fundación Museo Sorolla, Madrid. © Fundación Museo Sorolla, Madrid
Joaquín Sorolla, Mother, 1895–1900, Museo Sorolla, Madrid. © Museo Sorolla, Madrid
Joaquín Sorolla, Sewing the Sail, 1896, Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna di Ca' Pesaro, Venice. © Photo Archive - Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia
Joaquín Sorolla, Another Marguerite!, 1892, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. © Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis
Joaquín Sorolla, Clotilde in a Black Dress, 1906, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Joaquín Sorolla, Running along the Beach, Valencia, 1908, Museo de Bellas Artes de Asturias, Oviedo. © Museo de Bellas Artes de Asturias. Col. Pedro Masaveu
Joaquín Sorolla, The Breakwater, San Sebastián, 1918, Museo Sorolla, Madrid. © Museo Sorolla, Madrid