Sorolla

Organised by the Palau Martorell in collaboration with the Museo Sorolla and the Fundació Museu Sorolla, and curated by Blanca Pons-Sorolla and María López, the exhibition brought together 193 small-format oils on panel, cardboard and other supports from the Museo Sorolla collection.

Over his lifetime, Joaquín Sorolla painted close to two thousand of these small oils. He called them apuntes (notes), manchas (stains) or notes of colour: a format increasingly used by the great artists of the nineteenth century, since it allowed them to capture ideas and impressions at speed, in independent works that went far beyond a simple sketch.

Sorolla kept them in his studio, pinned across entire walls; soon he began to frame them, and they featured prominently in all his exhibitions. Small in size but bold in spirit, they contain flashes of Sorolla at his most brilliant, across his whole career — from his formative years to his consolidation as a master of light.

The itinerary followed Sorolla's entire career in three chapters. Formation and consolidation (1880-1903): from his training in Valencia to Rome and Paris, then Madrid, until — with Sol de tarde (1903) — he felt he had definitively found his style. His first sketches show the influence of Fortuny and the Italians, and the small formats gradually gained their independence: a parallel, experimental instrument — above all, a way of looking.

Artistic maturity (1904-1911): his first monographic exhibition at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris (1906), turned towards the subjects that offered him the greatest visual challenges — the variations of light through the day and the seasons, the colour of shadows, the reflections and transparencies of water — with the sea and the beaches as his richest stage. Then came the great international exhibitions: Germany, London and, in 1909, the Hispanic Society of New York, followed by Buffalo, Boston, Chicago and St. Louis, where his notes of colour were framed individually as fully autonomous works.

Plenitude (1912-1919): while the great mural commission for the Hispanic Society Library consumed most of his time, Sorolla painted for himself, without the pressure of exhibitions — intimate, silent garden pictures and some of his most beautiful beach scenes. His late sketches from the northern beaches, above all San Sebastián, show an ever more abbreviated execution: an essential Sorolla, still investigating the visual synthesis of forms in the open air.