Eight essays on Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, followed by Appreciations of the press

PRESENTED

TO

THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

fa<^^

EIGHT ESSAYS ON
JOAQUIN SOROLLA Y BASTIDA

VOLUME II

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Bi"o£

S

EIGHT ESSAYS

ON

JOAQUIN SOROLLA Y BASTIDA

BY

AURELIANO DE BERUETE,

CAMILLE MAUCLAIR, HENRI ROCHEFORT,

LEONARD WILLIAMS, ELISABETH LUTHER GARY,

JAMES GIBBONS HUNEKER, CHRISTIAN BRINTON,

AND

WILLIAM E. B. STARKWEATHER

FOLLOWED BY

APPRECIATIONS OF THE PRESS

Printed on the occasion of the Exhibition of Paintings by Senor Sorolla

at the invitation of the Hispanic Society of America, is6th Street,

West of Broadway, New York City, February 4 to March 9, 1909.

VOLUME II

THE HISPANIC SOCIETY OF AMERICA
NEW YORK 1909

Copyright, 1909, by

THE HISPANIC SOCIETY

OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

VOLUME I

FACE

JOAQUIN SOROLLA Y BASTIDA 9

Aureliano de Beruete

M. SOROLLA Y BASTIDA 101

Camille Mauclair

UN ASTRE QUI SE LEVE 173

Henri Rochefort

THE ART OF JOAQUIN SOROLLA 19 1

Leonard Williams

SOROLLA Y BASTIDA : ONE OF THE GREAT

MODERN MASTERS 329

Elisabeth Luther Gary

SOROLLA Y BASTIDA 365

James Gibbons Huneker

SOROLLA AT THE HISPANIC SOCIETY 407

Christian Brinton

VOLUME II

JOAQUIN SOROLLA : THE MAN AND His WORK . . 7
William E. B. Starkweather

APPRECIATIONS OF THE PRESS 129

CATALOGUE 375

JOAQUIN SOROLLA
THE MAN AND HIS WORK

BY WILLIAM E. B. STARKWEATHER

JOAQUIN SOROLLA

THE MAN AND HIS WORK1

DURING the past two decades, Spanish art has
made advances so great, that it to-day occupies
among contemporary European schools of painting
a position of proud preeminence.

Fifty years ago the essentially national art of Spain
seemed well-nigh extinct. Basing their work upon
the cold pseudo-classicism of David, there had grown
up in the peninsula a group of men \vho quite domi-
nated Spanish art and who devoted their considerable
talents to the painting of huge historical illustrations.
In the work of Frederico Madrazo and of his innu-
merable pupils, whose ranks included such distin-
guished craftsmen as Casado del Alisal and Resales,
we but occasionally find traces of that unwavering
naturalism which has been the characteristic of Span-
ish art in its greatest epochs.

Nor did the comet-like Fortuny, with his horde of
imitators and followers, serve to revive the historical

'This presentation of its subject, not before printed, has been
prepared as a lecture to be illustrated by the lantern.

school of Spain. Endowed with amazing natural
gifts, Fortuny chose to forsake his own country and
the subjects of his country and gave us a series of
works more French than Spanish and which, though
astounding in their technical achievement and glitter-
ing beauty, are not free from the reproach of insin-
cerity and commercialism.

From this chaos of French influence there has re-
cently emerged a group of artists of extraordinary
power, who, absolutely Spanish in style, have revived
the art of their Fatherland and are forcing it to that
position of eminence which it held in past centuries.
Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, Ignacio Zuloaga, Gonzalo
Bilbao, and Hernan Anglada are the leaders of this
movement.

The intensely national character of his work, his
extraordinary technical attainments, the catholicity of
his choice of subject, and the volume of his output
have given Sorolla an undisputed position as the chief
of this strong group of vigorous painters. For ten
years he has exerted a dominating influence over
Spanish art.

Sorolla's strength is the strength of the people.
Born of humble parents in Valencia, on the twenty-
seventh of February, 1863, he had the misfortune to
lose his parents during the great epidemic of cholera

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that swept the city two years later. Together with
his infant sister, he was adopted by his maternal aunt,
Dona Isabel Bastida, and her husband, Don Jose
Piqueres, the latter by trade a locksmith. At school
young Sorolla took no particular interest in his les-
sons, but spent the greater part of his time scribbling
and sketching on his school books. Finally, his uncle
withdrew the boy from the class-room and placed
him at the forge, where Sorolla worked away for
some time and laid the foundation for that splendid
physique which has served him so well in later years.
Sorolla soon began study at a drawing-school for
artisans, where he showed great ability. Encouraged
by the natural aptitude of his nephew, Senor Piqueres
permitted him to leave his work at the forge forever
and to attend the local art school known as the Real
Academia de San Carlos. Here the youth became
the favorite pupil of Estruch, and had the good for-
tune to enlist the interest of Senor Garcia, a celebrated
Valencian photographer, who assisted the struggling
artist for some years. Subsequently Sorolla married
the daughter of his patron, Dona Clotilda.

At seventeen Sorolla made his first trip to Madrid •
and exhibited a picture, a landscape, which to-day he
characterizes as "Very bad." "It could not have
been worse," he says laughingly. Led on by that

C'5]

tremendous ambition and enthusiasm which are the
greatest characteristics of the man, and amply backed
by his great bodily and mental force, Sorolla at twenty
years of age undertook the painting of a twelve-foot
canvas and gave us his first important picture, "The
Second of May."

This picture depicts the desperate resistance of the
Madrid people to the French in the Spanish War of
Independence. It is a turgid, immature work, imita-
tive in many ways of Goya; theatrical in treatment,
and deficient in technical achievement. It is inter-
esting, however, inasmuch as it forecasts something
of what the future art of Sorolla was to be. The
young painter started the huge work in a studio.
He found the result disappointingly unreal. Under
the first promptings of that tendency toward realism
which afterward became a passion with him, he
scraped his canvas clean and set it up again in the
open bull-ring of his native town. Here in clear sun-
light, with his models smoke-enshrouded to give the
effect of battle, he painted the picture. The reality
which the canvas thus gained is its principal claim
to merit. In 1884 he gained a scholarship from the
city of Valencia and wrent to Italy. Here he copied
from the Italian masters and, under the influence of
the classical Roman school, painted his only religious

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Pasajes

picture, "The Burial of the Saviour," a correct, but
cold and unrepresentative work.

A journey to Paris, however, gave the young man
opportunity to study works of Bastien-Lepage and
of Menzel. Among modern painters these two great
realists have been Sorolla's chief enthusiasms.

During his first visit to the Metropolitan Museum,
made a few weeks ago, it was Bastien-Lepage's great
picture, "Joan of Arc," that he looked for with im-
patience in every room. It was this picture that he
studied with greatest interest. And in the exhibition
of contemporary German art, the pictures of Menzel
moved him to boyish enthusiasm.

Returning to Italy he continued his work as a
copyist. Sorolla himself regards this Italian trip as
effort spent in vain. He had not found his definite
manner. Always determined, however, always indus-
trious, he produced several large works of rather in-
determinate style. With his return to Spain, Sorolla
fell upon difficult years. He was very poor and sup-
ported himself largely by the sale of water colors
and illustrations. He has told me that the first pic-
ture he ever sold, a landscape, brought him seven
pesetas, that is, $1.40, and that he painted small por-
trait heads at a dollar apiece. He was habitually
reduced to such shabby shifts as painting on the

coarse back of his canvas, instead of on the smoother
prepared side, so that his picture would have the
effect of having the tooth of a heavier and more
expensive canvas than that which he could afford.

Finally, in 1892, he exhibited at Madrid his first
representative picture, "Otra Margarita." His suc-
cess was immediate. He found himself at once
among the front ranks of Spanish masters. Brought
to the World's Fair at Chicago, this canvas now hangs
in the Museum at St. Louis.

With "Otra Margarita" the career of the Sorolla
the world knows may be said to have begun. He had
found himself.

Sorolla's work has come as a surprise and revela-
tion to the American public. Famous for years in
Europe, where he has won every honor within the
gift of the French government, he had shown but
little of his work in this country and has been repre-
sented here but by a few scattered and rather early
examples. Now, under the auspices of the public-
spirited Hispanic Society of America, which has
brought Sorolla to our country as its guest, he has
shown us a representative collection of his work in
a more splendid and harmonious setting than it has
ever before received.

Judged superficially, there might be a first tendency

OH

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to declare that we had seen work more essentially
Spanish than is his. Sorolla has done few costume
pictures. In his work you will find no gipsies, no
cigarette girls, no figures strumming guitars, none of
that passing Southern Spain for which tourists search
and which the general public expects of Spanish
pictures.

"They said I did not paint Spain," Sorolla once
exclaimed of some early French criticism of his work,
"because I did not paint a duchess with her arms
about the neck of a bull-fighter. That Spain, the
Spain of Theophile Gautier, no longer exists !''

I remember very well on my first trip to Spain that
the painter reproved me sharply for reading Gautier s
book, saying with patriotic pride that it maligned his
country as it is to-day.

Of the four great leaders of modern Spanish art,
Sorolla, Anglada, Zuloaga, and Bilbao, Sorolla is in
reality the most thoroughly national, because he is
the most thoroughly realistic. Only in rare instances
has he occupied himself with anything else than a
masterly representation of the appearance of things.
With psychology, philosophy or symbolism he is not
concerned and, like Velazquez and Goya, absolute
realism has been the basis of his art. Velazquez in
his third manner was undoubtedly the first of impres-

sionists. He threw aside traditions, or compromises
with tradition, and in Las Mcninas gave us a ren-
dering of what he actually saw instead of what he
knew to be there. The facts, the visual impressions
of that court group, are presented to us exactly as
they would have been recorded on our eye had we
been there to see and if we had had the keenness of
eye to discern. And as a result of this insistent
analysis, he arrived at giving us correct renderings
of the figures as they stood before him in illuminated
atmosphere, securing effects of unrivaled natural-
ness, and for the first time in the history of painting,
deriving tone and quality in a picture by a repre-
sentation based on natural harmony, rather than by
some arbitrary toning process of the studio. Goya,
much less limited in field than Velazquez, extended
the impressionism of the earlier master to suit his
own temperament. And Sorolla has taken this picto-
rial impressionism that is the heritage of Spanish art
and carried it ably on with the brilliant and extended
range of the palette of to-day.

His work has so far been marked by four distinct
manners. The Segovians, the oldest work in the
Hispanic Society exhibition, is a good example of
his first manner. Here the subject is more definitely
arranged than in his later work, the color is darker.

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the technic less spontaneous. In the figure of the
old man rising from his chair, of the girl with
her head turned toward the window, there is
some hint of a blind search toward those qualities
of transience and accident which so definitely mark
his later work.

In his second manner we find a much less delib-
erate arrangement, a much truer understanding of
illumination and submergence of figures in atmos-
phere, while his brush work has begun to assume
that surety and finality that now distinguish it.

His third manner is most clearly shown in his great
picture "Beaching the Boats." The elemental nature
of this scene, the struggle of man and beast with the
forces of wind and water, have given Sorolla perhaps
his greatest opportunity. One of his earliest large
canvases of this scene, painted when a little past
thirty, was bought for the Luxembourg by the French
government. Now in the fullness of his middle years
he has given us a final colossal treatment of this
subject, a masterpiece of painting and drawing that
has occupied places of honor when shown at London,
Paris, Madrid, Berlin, and New York. Here his
rendering of sunlight has reached a point of luminous
splendor and beauty beyond which he himself, nor
any other man indeed, has ever gone. The crafts-

C33]

manship of the picture is masterly. The tremendous
vigor, abundance, and fine sanity of the man's art
find in this canvas one of its greatest expressions.

Sorolla's work is characterized by extraordinary
excellence in three great qualities, drawing, paint-
ing, and color. It is well-nigh impossible to overstate
the triumph of his technic.

His drawing, at all times adequate, has become
wonderful in its simplicity and directness., in its
grasp of essentials, its searching characterization.
There is no problem of moving figure, of scintillant
sea, that offers him difficulty. He has said of draw-
ing, "The older I become, the more I realize that
drawing is the most important of all the problems of
picture-making. Whether you use three thousand
strokes, or ten strokes, in the painting of a shoul-
der, counts for nothing. What is really of im-
portance is that the shoulder be solid and well
constructed."

As a matter of fact, however, it is well-nigh im-
possible to separate his drawing from his painting.
His drawing is painting, his painting drawing. Few
would quarrel with the statement that he knows bet-
ter than any other living man how to apply pigment
to canvas. The surety, the brilliancy, the solidity of
his work, are unsurpassed in our time. And his tech-

[34]

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nic is majestic in its power and dignity. It never
descends to fireworks for fireworks' sake: his hand
is always the servant, never the master.

In his fourth manner, illustrated by his picture
entitled "Country People of Leon," the search for
reality has been carried so far that there remains no
trace of deliberated composition. This huge work
has been taken from life with the same lack of pre-
vious plan with which another artist would toss off
a thumb-nail sketch. Summoning all his extraor-
dinary equipment as a painter, Sorolla has made a
furious assault on the canvas in the effort to approxi-
mate as nearly as possible the effect of a picture
painted in a moment to represent what he had seen
in a moment of the kaleidoscopic group before him.
The canvas is a marvel of virtuosity. For simplifica-
tion, for certainty of technic, for speed, it stands
unequaled.

"The great difficulty with large canvases is that
they should by right be painted as fast as a sketch,"
Sorolla has said. "By speed only can you gain an
appearance of fleeting effect. But to paint a three-
yard canvas with the same despatch as one of ten
inches is well-nigh impossible." It is these theories
that have found expression in this latest phase of his
extraordinary art.

C39]

"But the canvas is twenty years ahead of its time,"
Sorolla has said of it. "I fear that people will hardly
like or understand it."

''Twice in your life," he has said to me, "you might,
through happy accident, arrive at painting a nose with
a single stroke of the brush. Things well done and
arrived at with this simplicity are marvelous in effect.
But it would be the maddest folly to go all your life
thereafter trying to paint noses with but one stroke,
for it would be manifestly impossible to sustain your-
self at a height the reaching of which is accidental.
When an artist begins to count strokes instead of
regarding nature he is lost. This preoccupation with
technic, at the expense of truth and sincerity, is
the principal fault I find in much of the work of
modern painters."

In color for outdoor work Sorolla has swept his
palette clear of all earthy or opaque colors such as
are generally employed in depicting shadows. "The
chief glory of the old masters," he has said, "is their
drawing and characterization. I find their color for
the most part purely conventional. The chocolate
brown shadows which they painted on the side of a
face, for example, do not exist. With all its ex-
cesses, the modern impressionistic movement has
given us one discovery, the color violet. It is the

[40]

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only discovery of importance in the art world since
Velazquez."

It is manifestly impossible, through lack of per-
spective, for a painter's contemporaries to judge what
place he will hold in future years among the great
figures of art. But if the name of Sorolla be finally
included among those of the immortals, it will be due
to his rendering of sunlight. "It is impossible really to
paint sunlight," he has said, "one can only approximate
it." But in many of his canvases he has certainly
come near to performing the impossible. It seems in-
credible in approaching some of these paintings, that
these effects are obtained with ordinary paint only.

One searches for some trick of reflection, of luster
paint, of concealed mirror, in these radiant canvases
of sparkling sea, of shining sail. As a master of
sunlight he ranks absolutely alone.

The art of Sorolla is an art of joy, of sunshine, of
splendid youth. He does not consider for a moment
failure or distress, old age or death. It is an art
somewhat savage, somewhat pagan; but it is an art
beautifully vigorous, admirably robust.

In a time when art is so concerned with the elabora-
tion of the minor and the mournful, his frank opti-
mism, his healthy delight in living, as shown in these
pictures, is a refreshing note.

C45]

Sorolla as a man is indefatigable. There is noth-
ing he cares about save his family and his art. To
these two objects he has devoted his entire life. He
goes into society as little as possible, and, in the past
thirty years, there have been comparatively few days,
save Sundays, when he has not worked six to nine
hours. His output has been enormous. At his exhi-
bition in Paris, three years ago, he showed five hun-
dred pictures, last year at London, two hundred and
seventy-eight. Some idea, too, may be gained of his
output when we remember that comparatively few of
the (356) canvases he is now exhibiting at the His-
panic Society are more than four or five years old.
Certainly, his work has never been seen to better
advantage than in the beautiful building of the His-
panic Society. And the unusual construction of the
building, with the decorative lines of the arches of
its patio, have given the exhibition a setting and tone
entirely distinct from that which it could have gained
in a more conventional gallery.

Sorolla's range of interest is very great. From
sunlit sea, he has turned to sunlit garden ; has shown
us opulent Spain in her happiest moods ; has painted
with delight whatever has caught his fancy with its
dash of life, its light, its picturesqueness. And the
great contrasts of the man's art, his almost incredible

[46]

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facility, are best shown in turning from such a picture
as his old Castilian, painted with robust picturesque-
ness, to his exquisite picture "Mother."

The volume and quality of his work are comparable
only to Rubens. Indeed, in their fiery ambition, in
the fierce necessity for creating, which each of the
artists has felt, as well as in their approach of art
entirely through outward aspect, one finds many
points of resemblance between these two men.

A painter of Sorolla's position in Spain has natu-
rally been called upon to paint some portraits of
Spanish royalty. Of the young King of Spain he
has given us one strong head, painted in four hours,
which shows remarkable insight and analysis, which
is indeed an historical record of the royal sitter before
him. The portrait is curious as having been auto-
graphed in paint by the king himself, the monarch
presenting it to one of Spain's grandees. The queen,
Victoria Eugenia, he has painted in her coronation
robes, and of the heir to the throne has given us a
delightful little sketch. As far as possible Sorolla
has abandoned the traditional manner of painting
royalty, the gold chair, the background curtain, and
in the portrait of the Infanta Isabella, one of the
most popular of the Spanish royal family, has devel-
oped an excellent quality in quiet gray. And in black

[Si]

he has given us a portrait of distinction of Princess
Henry of Battenberg, mother of the Queen of Spain.

It is true of all artists that their best portraits are
never official portraits, but those made of their own
families. Painting in a tranquil and familiar atmos-
phere those he knows and loves best, there is apt to
be a quality of ease and psychological understanding
in these portraits not so generally found in portraits
painted to order. It would be particularly fitting in
the considering of these delightful and intimate
family portraits of Sorolla, to commence with that
of his father-in-law, Senor Garcia, who gave him
generous backing during his early years. He is one
of the kindliest and simplest of men. Senora Garcia
and her granddaughter Maria have offered the theme
for a quiet and well characterized portrait that recalls
in its telling something of the color and manner of
Velazquez.

Sorolla's style as a portrait-painter has been
marked by four manners as well as has the style of
his general work. These are seen clearly in four
portraits of Senora de Sorolla. In his first style he
distinctly followed Velazquez, whose \vork he copied
as a young man. It is interesting to note in this con-
nection that Sorolla does not now advise students to
copy from this great master of Spanish art. "Go to

him and study, reverence him, but do not copy him,"
he says. "It would be of more value to you to put
up a basket of oranges and paint them than to repeat
Las Meninas."

In his second manner Sorolla has become more
robust, more personal. An example of this manner
is the portrait of Senora de Sorolla standing beside
a red chair. This graceful portrait he considers one
of his best works. The obscure and conventional
brown background that marked his earlier portraits
has disappeared and there is more of a tendency to
cool gray and black.

This tendency we find still more marked in his
latest portrait done indoors, showing Senora de
Sorolla wearing the Spanish mantilla, a very power-
ful work of fine quality. All trace of Velazquez in-
fluence has disappeared ; there is, however, quite a
hint of Goya in the furious painting and the rich blacks.

His fourth manner in portrait-painting is one of
the very recent developments of his art and is some-
thing entirely new in portraiture. This class includes
his portraits in sunlight. No sacrifices are made for
the head, as is so generally done in the usual portrait.
In a portrait of Senora de Sorolla at La Granja, we
have both a charming picture of a lady by a fountain,
and a remarkable character study as well.

[57]

In this class may be included a fine work of his
daughter Maria, also painted at La Granja. It is
something of a joke in the Sorolla family to say that
it is Maria who supports the family. Her father has
painted nis daughter innumerable times, and her por-
traits have an exceedingly ready sale. From the
walls of a hundred public and private museums por-
traits of Maria look down, as well as do representa
tions of his youngest daughter, Elena, shown in the
dainty "Kiss" picture. The Sorolla girls consider it
little short of scandalous if a work painted by their
father is not sold in three years, and I have heard
them joke their brother because pictures painted in
which he is the center'of interest do not sell so well.

Possibly the most striking of the portraits in sun-
light of this painter is that of Alfonso XIII in the uni-
form of the hussars. The King stands in the garden
of La Granja. The glitter of sun, the sparkle of light
on gilded military ornaments have given the painter
opportunity for remarkably picturesque effect.

The Duke of Alva is one of the last of a long
series of the distinguished sitters who have come
under Sorolla's brush. It is one of the most satis-
factory and most strongly characterized portraits he
has given us of the Spanish nobility.

Of the Don Alejandro Pidal y Mon, statesman

and man of letters, Sorolla has painted an excellent
head. It is interesting as an example of what the
painter can do in a single session of two hours, the
entire picture having been finished in that time. The
work is marked by the same thoughtful qualities as
those which characterize a subtle rendering of Don
Aureliano de Beruete, the Spanish authority on Velaz-
quez.

In contrast to these men might be shown most
fittingly a portrait of Blasco Ibanez. With what skill
the painter has changed his technic from the suave,
fine manner of the Beruete portrait, to the brusque,
brutal, trenchant style that aids so greatly in giving
proper character to the burly masculine figure of the
author of "Blood and Sand."

In sharp contrast again is the nervous sketch of
Franzen, the well-known Spanish photographer.

And no\v let us in imagination make a journey
together to Valencia and try to gain some glimpse of
Sorolla painting. It was at Valencia that Sorolla
was born, it is here he is most thoroughly at home,
it is here that he has done his greatest \vork. Sorolla
is a child of the sun, a modern Zoroastrian, and the
sun he loves best is the burnished orb of Spain's
midsummer.

It would be then an August night, say, at eight

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o'clock, when we board the express for Valencia in the
Estacion del Mediodia. The train slips through the
Spanish twilight into velvet night. Past mourning
Aranjuez we go ; the stations become more rare and
deserted as we plunge along. No longer we hear the
reedy cry of the child selling water, "Agua fresca !"
or the long-drawn wail, "Almohadas para viajeros !"
(Pillows for travelers). In the first dawn we tumble
out of the carriage at Albacete to buy a clasp knife,
the stock product of the town. The sun soars up
mercilessly as we go on. As we pass Jativa, the
early morning is already stifling and we decide crossly
that we dislike the town with its dusty palms, blazing
walls, and hedges of adelfas. At last the train pulls
along by the big red bull-ring of Valencia and lands
us in the Estacion del Norte, one of the ugliest
railway terminals of Europe.

Before the door, arid and uninviting, lies the Plaza
de San Francisco, relieved at its further end by a
mass of tropical trees. You have but to pass this
when, suddenly, you find yourself in one of the most
moving and picturesque towns of Spain. The peculiar
sparkle and brilliancy of the place under its glorious
sun, the clearness of its atmosphere, the radiance of
its very shadows, these seem to form the peculiar
key-note of Valencia and of Valencia's beach. There

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is plenty of glare in the city, but swinging awnings,
swaying shadows of palms speak of the nearness of
the sea. There is nothing oppressive in the illumina-
tion, as there is at Burgos, where the dying town
lies like a sick lizard, breathless in the yellow sun.
And there is nothing of the pitiless illumination
of Toledo, where that shadeless city sits gaunt,
blinded and exposed on its huge red cliff. In passing
through the town you may possibly catch a glimpse
of its great cathedral, of the picturesque market-place
dominated by the Lonja de la Seda, and, indeed, if
you watch sharply, may even see the Calle del Pintor
Sorolla, an important street named by a grateful
municipality after its illustrious son.

Valencia lies three miles from its port. For thirty
centimes a very modern electric tram carries the trav-
eler across the curious old Puente de Serranos. Be-
low, the river Turia, sun-dwindled, sulks along, a
mere rivulet of heavy water in its broad bed. We
pass a dusty tropic garden and enter the long Camino
del Grao with its bordering plantans. To the right
we pass a handsome garden belonging to Senor
Garcia, Sorolla's father-in-law, where the painter has
done some of his delightful orange studies; to the left
we hear the resonant din of an occasional foundry,
gain some glimpse of a cottage embowered in adelfas.

All this country has been reflected in the magic mirror
of Sorolla's art with the extraordinary sincerity and
vision that characterize the man. No aspect of the
country has been so mean, so lowly, as to leave him
cold. I well remember my amazement when, as a
green art student, trained in conventional schools, I
took my first walk with him through the country and
saw him stop entranced before a pile of manure cov-
ered with straw litter, the whole a sparkle in morning
light. "Stupendous, colossal, magnificent !" he said
with customary enthusiasm. "I am going to paint it !"
"I am going to paint it !" should be the crest of Sorolla.
It is a succinct expression of the man's whole soul.

The streets grow narrow and dirty, teams loaded
with merchandise drag slowly by, their drivers asleep.
A turn in the road and we are in the port itself. This
riffraff of tramp steamers, this hurly-burly of the
quay, Sorolla has caught in many of his pictures, and
he has devoted many other canvases to the motley
array of fishing-boats that find refuge in the inner
harbor.

To the north of the port, the train brings you to
Las Arenas ("The Sands"), a fashionable bathing
establishment. Across a foot-bridge, and we are on
the borderland of Sorolla's beach. Northward, along
the coast, staggers a slipshod fishing village called El

Cabanal. The houses are low, unpretentious white-
washed structures that blaze with color from door
and window ; for, "Gracias a Dios," we are in Spain,
where a man may paint his door blue and his window
pink with impunity. The low lines of the fishers'
huts are broken only here and there by the flare of a
pert summer villa, looking like nothing so much as
a big bonbon. Before the irregular row of cottages,
stretching an eighth of a mile in width to the violet
Mediterranean, blazes and shimmers an unbroken
sweep of smooth sand. It is dotted with fishing craft
of every description and alive with people. We have
reached Sorolla's real studio.

Perhaps the first impression made on one's eye at
the beach is the glory of the fluttering sails of the
fishing-boats that rest in a row by the edge of the sea.
Their sails are curious in form, doubtless just like
those of the Grecian and Phenician craft that came
to these sunlit shores so long ago. The bird-like belly-
ing movements of these clouds of canvas, as they
sway drying in the sun and wind, have been a note that
has fascinated Sorolla and that he has reproduced
again and again, and always with his extraordinary
facility for seizing the accidents of motion.

About these boats center the life of the beach. Per-
haps a boat is just coming in and is being beached in

C75]

the way peculiar to Valencian folk. Several yoke of
oxen are driven into the sea and hitched to the boat's
prow. Ways are laid under the keel, and then the
vessel is dragged in through the surf to the sand.

The fishing-boat once on the sand, the fishing
people swarm about to see the catch ; the children who
have been bathing nearby crowd around. It is a
moment of chatter and bargaining, of screaming and
laughter. The beach of Cabanal is no place for those
with weak eyes. The sun is not only in the sky. It
blazes at us from the wet side of a boat, gleams on
the silken head-dress of Josepha Maria, glints on the
fish she is selling, reflects from the wet back of her
bathing child, is thrown back by the curve of a wave.
The whole scene is radiant with light, with youth,
with the joy of living.

"Alegria del Agua," Sorolla has called one of his
pictures. It shows a romping mob of children racing
into the sea. "Alegria del Agua" with "Alegria del
Sol" might be taken for a description of Cabanal
beach and for a description of Sorolla's art as an
outdoor painter.

What dexterous use he has made of all the pictur-
esque material the beach offers ! Some of the little
girls he has painted in their wind-blown bathing gar-
ments have the charm of the delightful figures of

OH

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Concha, San Sebastian

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Tanagra. The nude little savages he has shown dis-
porting themselves in the waves furnish a rare oppor-
tunity to study his wonderful drawing, the amazing
surety and simplicity of his technic.

In the glitter and gorgeousness of the Valencia
beach there is one sad note. At five o'clock in the
afternoon may be seen coming through a country
road a group of boys dressed in the drab of an or-
phanage, and guided by two Franciscans. They are
the offcast children of wretched parents. Most of
them are crippled, some of them bear the stigmata of
idiocy, many are totally blind. As the melancholy
cortege reaches the beach, however, boy nature asserts
itself against physical limitations. There is a thin cry
of joy, and the whole pathetic, grotesque company
rush for the water with what speed they can make.
The moment of the bath Sorolla has taken for his
picture "Triste Herencia," which won for him the
grand prize in Paris and Madrid. "It is the only sad
picture I ever painted," he says of it. "I suffered
greatly. I shall never do another."

Nine o'clock finds Sorolla at work upon the beach.
He works standing, at the water's edge, his models
often before him in the wash of the sea. The Medi-
terranean, practically tideless, permits one to work by
its side all the morning without moving. Back of
[81]

Sorolla is generally arranged a huge piece of canvas
stretched on poles and painted black to avoid reflec-
tions on the picture, and placed in such a way as to
screen him from the unduly curious. At his feet sits
Pepe, one of the most intelligent, and most certainly
the laziest fisherman in Spain. During the summer,
Pepe serves Sorolla, carries his canvases on his head,
cleans palettes, searches for models. At times Pepe
is himself a model, and as Pepe has a widely assorted
lot of children of his own, who often pose, he makes a
very good thing of his summer. Pepe is a philos-
opher. As he lies in the shade and watches the
painter work, he comments on life, propounding the
theory that only six years of life are of value, the
years from six to twelve. "From one to six you are
a baby," he says, "life does not count. From six to
twelve life is all gold. At twelve all joy is ended,
you must work, you have responsibility." And, sigh-
ing heavily, he lights another cigarette of abominable
tobacco, and rolls back further into the shade.

One wonders which is more pitiless, the sun above,
or the furnace of the sands beneath. A wind from
the sea brings no comfort, and, indeed, only prevents
keeping up a sun umbrella. All day long, and every
day in the summer, Sorolla paints calmly on in the
sun, in a heat that often reaches no in the shade.

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195

It is a trial by fire for any northern born student who
tries to keep up the tremendous pace. Sometimes at
five o'clock, after six and a half hours of this paint-
ing, Sorolla begins another study by the sea, and
paints until sunset. He has done this for twenty-five
years. Can this explain some of the wonder of
his technic? "Have you worked?" "Have you
worked?" is the insistent question he is constantly
putting to a student, even though long since he has
learned that the student leaves no hour unoccupied.

It is a most interesting thing to see Sorolla paint-
ing. I will tell you a little incident of his work
typical of the man. Once, after a tremendous day,
at five o'clock in the afternoon, Sorolla began on an-
other study of a little girl entering the sea. To make
his picture less a figure study, he decided to put three
little children in the sea. Two little girls and a boy
waded into the water hand in hand, laughing, mak-
ing no particular effort to stand still. They were, in-
deed, washed here and there by the waves. Sorolla
painted the three wet figures, gleaming in the gold of
the setting sun, in fifteen minutes. It was a marvelous
display of master painting. At twilight I went down
the beach to put my painting things in a shack for the
night. In the darkness of the place I heard groaning.
Stretched at full length, face down on the dirt floor,

1*71

was a Spanish student of Sorolla, who had been with
me but a short time before, watching the painter.
I thought he had a sunstroke, and was seriously
alarmed.

Suddenly, the young fellow turned on me fiercely :
"Did you see Sorolla paint those children?" he cried.
"Yes."

"Do you ever think you can learn to paint like
that?"

And then, without waiting for a reply, he bawled :
"You can't, I can't, nobody else can ! He don't know
himself how he paints. He just paints as a cow eats !"
A superficial study of Sorolla's painting might
lead one to think Francisco was right. He paints ap-
parently without any worry or preoccupation, very,
very fast, and with tremendous surety. "I could not
paint at all if I had to paint slowly," he says. "Every
effect is so transient, it must be rapidly painted." He
grasps in a few searching strokes an accidental move-
ment, a fleeting expression, a retreating wave. There
seems to be no mistake, no undoing. His picture
builds steadily to completion. Most of his pictures
are painted in from four to six mornings, many in
one or two. He does not arrange in his mind before
he starts what sort of a picture he is to get. One of
his most common criticisms of a pupil's \vork is, "This
£88]

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looks fixed up, as if you had an idea before you
started of what you would make of the scene. Go to
nature with no parti pris. You should not know
what your picture is to look like until it is done."

"Just see the picture that is coming," he says often
of his canvases, as they are being built up, exactly as
a photographer, in developing a plate, watches with
suspense emerge on the film the scene he photo-
graphed. His big pictures are painted in almost the
same way. There is no elaborate composition sketch.
A German firm once wrote with a view to buying the
original sketch for the picture "Beaching the Boats."
"There was none," he replied. His big pictures are
worked directly from nature in a shack built by the
sea.

Francisco was wrong in thinking that Sorolla does
not know how he paints. The ease and brilliancy of
his work blinds us at first view to all evidences of long
and thoughtful training. Always back of his paint-
ing is that twenty-five years in which he has painted
and smoked a great deal, eaten and slept a little.
Than this Sorolla does nothing. In the development
of his work, everything has been studied, everything
has been watched, all false paths avoided, every dan-
ger met. A student said to Sorolla, "I have arrived
fairly well in drawing, fairly well in the technic of

C93]

painting, but in the regard for drawing and painting
when working from nature, I find it difficult to look
out for fine quality."

"Ah ! That is the last thing one arrives at," said
Sorolla. Then he tapped his forehead. "It is here
you do it," he said.

One hundred miles south of Valencia, a little used
narrow-gage railway brings us through an opulent
country to a shack of a railway-station known as
Vergel. The only train that brings you there in the
day arrives exactly at noon. From the station there
is nothing to see save a miserable fonda across the
way and a blazing white road that stretches away in
radiant sunlight across the treeless plain. That
twelve-mile ride in the tumble-down Vergel diligence
is not a tempting prospect, but it is the opening of the
door of Javea, a hidden Paradise where Sorolla has
done a great part of his outdoor work.

Those twelve miles are very, very long. The dust
powders you as white as it has silvered the vineyard
by the wayside. The fat lady who has come with her
maid to spend two weeks in the country with her
family, cries, "Dios, que calor," and swears by all the
saints that the climate is changing and that the sum-
mers are surely warmer than when she was a girl.
Her servant pulls close the curtains of the crazy vehi-

C94]

cle to keep out the light and the dust. We lumber
through many a Spanish village with its white-washed
walls, gay doors and windows, dominating church,
staring faces. What strikes one as very curious is to
find electric lights in most of these villages that are
absolutely without other evidence of modern civiliza-
tion. Ahead of one in the plain looms Mongo, a
mountain of naked rock. For it, the road makes a
vast detour, and at the crest of a little hill we look
at last upon Javea.

An Arab town, is your first thought. In a con-
fused mass of white-walled houses, half- revealed rose
gardens and beaten, unpaved roads, the town creeps
down to its beach. The violet of the bay is held at
the sides by the splendor of two great capes, San
Antonio and Nao. Their walls of rock sweep far out
into the sea and form the most eastern projection of
Spain in the Mediterranean. Blocked from north and
south by these sentinels, backed by Mongo, the town
sleeps as though lulled by its hushing sea, by the
sighing cypresses about its well-trodden calvary. The
town has no hotel ; Baedeker is unknown. A slat-
tern woman, at one wretched place, after prodigious
scurrying about by her husband to buy provisions,
serves you two fried eggs, a piece of cold fish, and
some black olives.

A walk through the town will take you past some
of the great raisin warehouses. Inside, in the semi-
gloom, hundreds of women are stemming raisins for
shipment to England. As they work, they sing in
honor of the Virgin a dragging canticle that echoes
through the ancient arches of the place and out into
the still afternoon air.

Life is in every way most primitive and living is
very cheap. A furnished house near the quay may be
rented for eleven cents a day, but beware, unless you
bring an establishment of servants with you from
Madrid, you may find little to eat. There is no ice,
and little meat. Butter is a messy mass brought in a
tin from Switzerland, or even Denmark, and served
day after day in the same tin until it becomes a rancid
offense. Inquiry elicits a fabled report that a certain
very rich man actually has some cows on a farm far
away, but that their milk is precious beyond selling,
and is sent only as a gift of great price to those far
gone in sickness. Goats' milk only may be had. An-
tonio drives the goats to your place and milks them
just before your breakfast, and the milk is drunk
warm before it spoils with the heat. "My milk is
better than Vicente's," says the goatherd. "I know
best the places in the mountain where there is grass."
This he says with the air of a botanist announcing

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the secret of a bed of rarest orchids. Meat is covered
thick with salt, and hung- in a tin pail down a well.
A hapless artist who would perforce live near the
sea, must throw himself on the mercy of Paquita,
who may or may not be willing to cook for him in the
back room of her grocery. Without butter, every-
thing is fried or boiled with olive oil. The cooking
is done out of doors over a tiny fire of twigs. The
fish is delightful, so are the melons, but strange,
crawly things of the sea are served, whose like you
have only before seen in alcohol bottles in zoological
museums. Occasionally, on opening a soup tureen,
you find floating on the surface of the oil soup a good-
sized fish, boiled, head and all. Its single visible eye
stares at you glassily, and you replace the cover of
the dish and turn to find what further adventure din-
ner may bring you.

Javea is the ideal place for a painter. There are no
newspapers, no letters, no engagements. One paints
from dawn to dusk. It is the huge, tawny rocks of
the place under the pitiless and searching illumination
of the sun of Alicante that supply the characteristic
paintable note of the place. Here Sorolla has shown
us wonderful studies of the children of the port at
play, as in the remarkable study of the boy hunting
mussels. These happy little savages play about all

day in a freedom undisturbed by problems of primary
education. "Is there a river between New York
and England?" asked a sixteen-year-old girl, at
Javea, "or is London separated from England only
by mountains?" It was in the limpid waters of this
port that Sorolla undertook the solution of a problem
of the swirl of sun-pierced water about a human
figure. Of this subject he made several preliminary
studies, and then in four afternoons of brisk work pro-
duced his large canvas. The. composition for this
picture \vas scrawled on the side of his house in
charcoal wrhile servants were busy stretching the big
canvas for the work. The picture was painted, of
course, directly from nature, the stretcher being tied
with ropes to some posts which had been arranged
temporarily on a ledge of rock, first chiseled smooth
for the purpose. Six urchins served in relays as
models, three swimming round and round for the
painter, while three rested and warmed themselves
in the sun. Of his own family bathing among the
rocks of Javea he has shown us some delightful pic-
tures, that reflect all the gaiety, radiant happiness, and
intimacy of the scene. Plunging about in the swing-
ing sea and clear waters of these secret glens, with
the laughter of the Sorolla children echoing back
from the rocks about, it seems impossible to believe

r'io6]

206

Patio del Cabanal

207

En el rio

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e Valencia

209

that there is anything in the world but youth and
laughter and success. The colors at Javea are almost
unbelievable. Above, a cloudless sky of violet-blue is
broken by the mounting yellow walls of Cabo San
Antonio, all about the rock formations are brilliant
with imbedded stones of every hue, while every swirl
of the water discovers a wealth of color in the swing-
ing, growing plants that find their home in the sea.

"I can't paint that," "I can't paint that," Sorolla
often says of these incidents at Javea. "Everybody
would only say it was made up in the studio." And
then he adds, "As far as outdoor work is concerned,
a studio is only a garage ; a place in which to store
pictures and repair them, never a place in which to
paint them."

Spain's eastern coast has not always held the atten-
tion of the artist. In his earlier manner he has given
us some canvases full of the quiet charm of Asturias
and Galicia, with their English-like landscape of
sloping hillside and opulent trees. The somber hills
and mountains near Segovia have given him their
quota of subjects and the quiet restraint of the pic-
tures form a sharp contrast to the opulent blaze of the
greater part of his work. One summer at least found
him at worldly Biarritz, for which as a whole he had
little sympathy. Painting with the charm with which
[in]

he always depicts his children, he shows us his house-
hold on an afternoon walk upon the cliffs near the
lighthouse. The work has all the idle accident, the
informality, the ease and intimacy of the scene itself.
A lady amusing herself with amateur photography
has supplied him with a brilliant opportunity for sun-
light painting, as well as has an extraordinary study
of his daughter Maria against the chaos of a sunlit
sea.

Two of the great historic cities of Spain have also
been revealed by his brush, Toledo and Sevilla.
Toledo was visited during the winter and the studies
made there lack the fierce edge of sun that the sum-
mer traveler associates with this town. For poetic
charm, for the amazing sincerity of his style, these
studies are unsurpassed. It seems unbelievable that
results so subtile, so exquisite could be obtained with
brush-marks so few and so broad. He has seized at
once the atmosphere of blood and grimness and death,
of splendor, parade, and decay that characterize this
place and crystallized them in such a study, for exam-
ple, as that of the Puente de Alcantara, with its sug-
gestion of the sluggish Tagus below, its hint of
frowning walls above. One of the most picturesque
bridges of Toledo is the old fortified bridge of San
Martin, with its entrances commanded by two great

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stone towers. The ravine of the Tagus here reaches
a considerable depth, and from the bridge a splendid
view offers of the sun-scarred country about. Sorolla
has shown us with unrivaled skill the tumble-down
ruin of San Servando, on its deserted hillside, and has
taken us into the house in which the mystic Greco
dreamed and painted, and in which he died.

Twice he has painted within royal precincts, first
at Sevilla, where he was commanded to paint portraits
of the Queen and the heir to the throne. Here he
painted a jewel-like series of pictures of the Alcazar
or old Moorish palace. This series is the most deco-
rative of all his productions. Sorolla's joy in the
pleasant things of life is shown clearly in his love of
gardens, and of these subjects alone he has painted
enough pictures to have equaled the lifework of an-
other artist. His pictures of these opulent oriental
courts, with their roses and orange trees, their fervid
color, their heat, will carry many of us back in
memory to holidays spent in that most marvelous,
most beautiful of Spanish cities, Sevilla. The man's
preeminence in outdoor work, the unrivaled prismatic
splendor of his color, can best be judged by comparing
this series of studies with results which other artists
have obtained in this most painted of palaces.

In contrast to the oriental color and quality of

these Moorish courts, \ve turn to the mournful pomp
of La Gran j a, with the desolate splendor of that
eighteenth-century garden built by a homesick French-
man in memory of Versailles. Few of Sorolla's
canvases have greater feeling than these renderings
of haunted garden, of dilapidated fountain. How
admirable is his drawing of this rippling water. It
shows the same careful observation, the same search
for anatomy that we find he devotes to the telling of
the turn of an arm, the curve of a shoulder. And at
La Gran j a he has given us one unforgetable picture
of little children at their bath in the trout stream that
flows by the palace grounds.

It would be fitting to close our series of pictures,
this evening, with the last work the artist painted
before coming to America, a superb decorative canvas,
showing his two daughters dressed in the Valencian
costume of 1808, and on horseback. It was painted, as
are all his works, directly from nature, the two girls
being mounted on a horse held by a servant, in the
garden of their Madrid house.

Sorolla is but forty-six years old. He is in the
height of his power, the height of his success. In
his sane and illuminating art there is no trace of
decadence, of weakening, or of carelessness. Success
has brought the man nothing of pose or of relaxation.

214

Malvas reales

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Los geranic

Altar de San Vicente, Valencia

2l6

Feverish energy, tremendous health, great keenness
of mind, all these are still his great endowments. For
him the star of ambition shines fiercely, dimming all
else on his horizon : he is endowed with that consum-
ing creative passion characteristic of genius. The
future is his.

I know of no more fitting way to close my remarks
on this great painter, this evening, than by quoting in
his regard the beautiful legend engraved on the medal
of the Hispanic Society of America, to whose public
spirit and enlightenment the American people and
Sorolla owe so much.

"Blessed are those whom genius has inspired. They
are like stars. They rise and set. They have the wor-
ship of the world, but no repose."

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APPRECIATIONS OF THE PRESS

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.,..— TW*^...

Mercado de Lee

APPRECIATIONS OF THE PRESS1

(The Evening Post, February 4, 1909.)

SOROLLA Y BASTIDA EXHIBIT

To THE EDITOR OF THE EVENING POST :
SIR: May I add a few words to the announcement
made in your issue of last Saturday of the approach-
ing exhibition of the paintings by Senor Sorolla y
Bastida, at the Spanish Museum? In 1906 a similar
exhibition of some 400 canvases electrified Paris. It
was my privilege to see it more than once, and the
uplifting impression then received was never to be
forgotten.

Sorolla is a past master of everything that is
joyous in art. His color is brilliant and sane, his
technic virile and sure, and his versatility amazing.
He covers, with almost equal touch, the whole field
of easel art— portraits, landscapes, delightful studies
of child-life out of doors, and noble animal studies,
the latter being the subject of the large canvas owned
by the Luxembourg, of oxen towing a boat ashore.

1 The following are only a few chosen from many, of which
others would doubtless equally invite reproduction.

D35]

Sorolla is a man in middle life who has trodden
the road to fame very modestly, but surely. With
the exception of Goya, who revolutionized modern
art, and to whom he owes much, Sorolla y Bastida
stands in the estimate of many next to Velazquez in
the list of Spanish masters.

J. G. MOTTET.

(The Evening Post, February 4, 1909.)

IF the New York public does not take advantage of
the exhibition of Sorolla y Bastida's pictures at the
Hispanic-American Museum, it will gain a well
deserved reputation for having no love for really
great art. The exhibition is the most important we
have had for many a long day. For two months men
have been at work gutting the museum of its Spanish
treasures to provide room for the pictures which now
occupy the alcoves on the floor of the hall and the
walls of the gallery above. An immense amount of
artificial light has been provided, and by some it was
thought that the electric lights gave the sun-lit paint-
ings a fictitious brilliancy. But it was our privilege
to see some of the Valencia beach scenes without the

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aid of artificial light, and they did not lose one iota
of their brilliant tone. One Hundred and Fifty-sixth
Street sounds very like the other end of the world,
but it takes less than half an hour by a Broadway
express on the subway from Forty-second Street to
One Hundred and Fifty-seventh Street.

A FEW words about Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida. He
is a modest little fellow, who talks no English and
not much French. He will enter his forty-seventh
year the end of this month. He was born in Va-
lencia, was left an orphan when he was two years
old, both parents being carried off by cholera, and
was adopted by an aunt, the wife of a locksmith. At
school he spent much of his time making drawings in
his copy-books, and was actually encouraged by the
master. As he made no progress in his lessons, his
uncle took him away from school and placed him in
his workshop, but allowed him to attend drawing
classes, and, at the age of fifteen, he was permitted to
devote himself entirely to art. He became a student
at the academy at Valencia, and almost immediately
won the prize for coloring, drawing from the model,
and perspective. A gentleman named Garcia, whose
daughter Sorolla afterward married, became inter-
ested in the youth, and enabled him to remain for

several years at the academy. When he first exhib-
ited at Madrid his pictures attracted no attention
until he showed "The Second of May," a scene of the
Spanish War of Independence, which contained the
striking innovation of having been painted in the
open air. Sorolla won a scholarship which took him
to Rome; thence he went to Paris, where the works
of Menzel and Bastien-Lepage opened his eyes to the
revolution that was going on in art. It was "The
Fishing Boat's Return," exhibited at the Salon in
Paris and purchased by the Luxembourg, that first
gave Sorolla a world-wide fame. The "Beaching of
the Boat" (318), in the exhibition at the Hispanic-
American Museum, repeats the same motive on a
larger scale. The walls of the museum tell the rest
of his artistic career.

(From the New York Herald, February 5, 1909.)

MR. SOROLLA'S ART SHOWN IN ARRAY
OF 356 CANVASES

SPANISH PAINTER OPENS EXHIBITION IN MUSEUM OF
HISPANIC SOCIETY — A MASTER OF METHODS

PAINTINGS by Mr. Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, a
leader in art in Spain, were placed on exhibition

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Huerta de Valencia

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yesterday in the museum of the Hispanic Society, at
Broadway and 1 56th Street.

Here is a "one man show," of almost huge dimen-
sions, for Mr. Sorolla displays 356 canvases, eighteen
more than could be hung in the space available for
the last exhibition of the National Academy of De-
sign. The museum is not quite adapted for the
showing of so large a collection, but skilful use of
artificial light has adequately answered the purpose
of the exhibition, which is to give to New York an
idea of the art of one of Spain's greatest painters.

Mr. Sorolla is no faddist ; he does not proclaim him-
self as the head of any school. He goes his own way
into the realm of a cheerful realism. To tell in
detail of the pictures which hang upon the dark walls
of the museum would be like reviewing an exhibition
of the works of many artists, all painting with con-
summate skill yet with variations of style. Here Mr.
Sorolla wields his brush broadly, and there with
smoothness. He covers this canvas thick with paint
and again leaves the texture of it scarcely concealed.
Here he tends toward French impressionism ; there
he paints with the exactitude of the early English
portrait-painters. The dominant note of the exhibi-
tion is sincerity and earnestness.

Everything in this world seems to appeal to Mr.

£147:1

Sorolla. He limns king and peasant, youth and age,
health and faltering disease, the palace and the
raisin shed, the gardens where pleasant fountains
flow and the barren dust heap. In all that he does he
is a master.

Six portraits of members of the royal family of
Spain are in the collection. King Alfonso is shown
in the brilliant uniform of the hussars- and again in
the garb of the artillery. There is a charming like-
ness of the young Queen and nestling in his crib with
only his small red face revealed is the heir to the
Spanish throne, the young Prince of the Asturias.
There are also portraits of the Infanta of Spain and
Princess Henry of Battenberg.

For the remainder of the exhibition it may be said
that its subject is all humanity. Although the art of
Mr. Sorolla is that which conceals art, his wonder-
ful technic triumphs in a greater degree when he
paints children swimming or playing in the surf or
along the beaches. There are several canvases which
depict nude youngsters swimming, and so naturally
are the tints and the texture of the flesh represented
and all the values of greenish water given that the
effect is as though one were actually looking from a
window upon a coast where children were at nata-
torial play.

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i*;." U'jJ'* >;''"> " • ''^ai^^&aE^

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In the "Old Castilian" Mr. Sorolla appears as a
genius in genre, while in "The Sad Inheritance," a
painting lent by the Church of the Ascension, he
sounds the depths of pathos. Taken all in all his art
lives in the sunshine even when it is sad.

Among the canvases especially distinguished by the
grace and beauty of their subjects is "In the Gardens
of La Granja."

(The New York Times, February 5, 1909.)

SOROLLA Y BASTIDA, whose works are to be seen at a
private view this week, and are to be on public ex-
hibition at the Hispanic Museum, 1 56th Street, west
of Broadway, from February 8th until March 8th,
is one of the most important of the followers of the
great artists of ancient Spain, and the opportunity to
enjoy his pictures in this country is one more of those
happily increasing opportunities which not only
broaden international sympathies but stimulate the
love of art among our own people.

Seiior Sorolla was born at Valencia, in Spain, in
1863, and began seriously to study art at the age of
fifteen. He studied at the academy of his birthplace
for several years, and won a scholarship which en-

C'533

titled him to a period of study in Italy. He visited
Paris also, where he was profoundly impressed by
two exhibitions in the French capital at the time—
one of the work of Bastien-Lepage and the other of
the work of the German, Menzel. In Italy he copied
the old Italian masters and in Madrid he copied Ve-
lazquez and Ribera, all of which work went to the
strengthening of his technical capacity without inter-
fering with his personal message.

His personal message is a national one as well.
His work has the stamp of his race. He is nearer to
Goya than to Velazquez, but is wholly without Goya's
cruelty of temper and brutality of vision. His Spain
is a pleasant country, populated by kindly, intelligent
people, and he depicts both the country and the people
with a genial warmth of sympathy and an apprecia-
tion of the gayer side of life that is at once stimu-
lating and soothing.

His portraits are grave or brilliant in treatment as
the subject demands, but are invariably spontaneous
and filled with the spirit of life. Among them are
many personages interesting for the place they occupy
in the Spanish world as well as for their interpreta-
tion by the painter. There are six portraits of mem-
bers of the royal family— two of Alfonso XIII, that
in the uniform of artillery having a look of the Phil-

C'54]

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Mujeres jugando

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ips in Velazquez's patient record of royalty; one of
the Queen of Spain, one of the Princess Henry of
Battenberg, and one of the Infanta. And there is a
bewitching portrait of the baby Prince of the Astu-
rias. There is also the Senor D. Raimundo de Ma-
drazo, an eminent portrait-painter, and there is the
Senor D. Alejandro Pidal y Mon, a statesman and
man of letters, who looks his great distinction and
who in addition to his accomplishments is noted as
the possessor of the unique manuscript of the poem
of the Cid. There are Senor Menendez y Pelayo,
the most eminent living scholar in Spain, and Senor
de Beruete, whose work on Velazquez is the supreme
authority; also the Marques de la Vega-Ynclan, who
is head of the royal stables and who has founded a
museum of El Greco at Madrid, and other personages
not less important.

Discussion of the paintings, which number more
than three hundred and fifty, must be deferred to a
later notice. The exhibition is too vital an introduc-
tion to the modern art of Spain to be summed up in
a few words or in one impression.

CI59]

{The Evening Post, February 5, 1909.)

SPAIN'S GREAT PAINTER

EXHIBITION OF PICTURES BY SOROLLA Y BASTIDA

THE New York public will owe a deep debt of grati-
tude to The Hispanic Society for giving it an oppor-
tunity of seeing the paintings of a Spanish artist,
Sorolla y Bastida of Valencia, whose work has in the
last few years created much enthusiasm in the art
world of Europe. The exhibition, now on private
view in the building of the Hispanic Society of Amer-
ica, on One Hundred and Fifty-sixth Street, west of
Broadway, will be open to the public, free of charge,
on Monday next, and will remain open until March
8th, Sundays included, between the hours of 1 1 A. M.
and 9 P. M. No one who appreciates great painting
should miss seeing the exhibition, for Sorolla is a
very great painter; not one of his brother artists, not
one amateur of art, who has seen his work, but ranks
him among the greatest painters of the day.

Sorolla is preeminently a realist and an open-air

painter. His first important work, "The Second of

May," painted in 1884, representing the resistance of

the people of Madrid to the French in the War of In-

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dependence of 1808, struck a new note. It was
painted in the open air.

"I hate darkness," he will tell yon. "Claude Monet
once said that painting in general did not have light
enough in it. I agree with him. We painters, how-
ever, can never reproduce sunlight as it really is. I
can only approach the truth of it." And again. "I do
not care to paint portraits indoors. I cannot feel
sympathetic."

There are in the exhibition 350 paintings and
sketches— "notes of color," as Sorolla calls them.
To deal with all, in our limited space, would be an
impossibility. Let us speak, then, of a few of those
open-air pictures into which the painter's sympathy
enters, that sympathy which can even make an ugly
subject beautiful; where, with a swift and unerring
hand and a brush full of brilliant color, he sweeps in
the actuality of life — almost without exception, the
joyousness of life — and in his sweep produces mar-
velous modeling.

Sorolla probably learned much from the early im-
pressionists, but, unlike the modern school, he never
betrays his technic ; his work appears spontaneous.
We spoke of his unerring hand. It is said, and we
have the authority of an artist who has painted side
by side with him, that Sorolla never makes a correc-

tion — to use that artist's own expression, "he paints
with the hand of God." At any rate, however he
paints, he gives one the impression of dashing in with
extraordinary rapidity what he was actually seeing,
without having studied the scene, and to all that he
lends remarkable quality.

Take, for instance, "Alegria del Agua" ("Water
Joy" ) . It is a scene on the beach at Valencia ; naked
boys are galloping into the sea, and two girls, wearing
light bathing-suits, are trotting toward the water; in
the distance are fishing-boats scudding with their
sails full. Boys and girls and boats are full of ac-
tion, and the drawing of the figures is quite extraor-
dinary. In another picture, "Corriendo por la Playa"
("Running Along the Beach"), the movement of the
two girls and a boy is even still more remarkable.
Note, too, how the hands, which, at a short distance,
appear to be so carefully modeled, are dashed in with
bright orange paint ; note, too, with what a few
strokes the perfect modeling of the boy who is in the
water in the distance is done. This is rather an ex-
ception, for, as a rule, Sorolla only suggests the dis-
tant figures. The grandeur of the color in these two
cases, as in the rest of the pictures we are about to
describe, must be taken for granted ; it would be an
idle repetition to mention it.
['663

Original sketch for Xo. 350

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But talking of modeling, there is no picture in the
exhibition where one can study better how Sorolla
makes a perfect drawing by means of a strong line
than in the one that shows a peasant woman bearing
her naked grandchild, and there is no doubt she is
moving to the sea. The baby's beautiful little head
leans against its grandmother's neck, while the right
arm clings to the old woman's left fore-shoulder.
The grandmother wears a dark blue blouse, a pale
blue dress, and a mauve apron. The extraordinary
drawing of that baby's right arm is done by two
sharp strokes of dark blue on the woman's blouse,
one above the arm, the other below. The modeling
of the baby's back, too, is perfect. There is not an
artificial stroke in the whole painting. It is pure
color throughout and all the modeling is made by the
play of color.

Study, too, the modeling of the baby boy in "Al
Bano" ("At the Bath"), who toddles hands in hands
between his big and little sister. With what simple
methods are the muscles worked in; notice the care-
less stride of the elder girl; the tender solicitude of
the younger, and the skill displayed in the drawing of
her hand and that of the baby which she holds.
Again in the picture numbered 303, a boy and girl on
their way to the water, what modeling in the boy,

what a play of sunshine in the whole picture. But as
a tour de force in the play of sunlight the "Despues
del Baiio" ("After the Bath") is startling and almost
makes one doubt Sorolla's word that he can only ap-
proach the truth of it. It represents a laughing girl
buttoning the shoulder of her wet bathing dress. A
boy holds up a white sheet to cover her with through
which one sees the color of his naked limbs. If that
is not true sunlight which falls upon the sheet, hits
the girl's arm, and gives a dash of turquoise blue to
one of her feet, it is a very close imitation. But we
could go on for pages describing the beauty of these
beach scenes; the composition of "Morning on the
Beach at Valencia," the group on the shore, the bath-
ing boys, and the boats with their bellying sails ; the
extraordinary modeling of the boy crabbing, of the
young girl in "El Bano, Javea" (98), and the sparkle
of the water into which she is about to dive, and the
color of "Salida del Baiio" ("Coming Out of the
Bath").

There is one picture that strikes a deeper note than
these — the one sad picture of the whole exhibition.
It is called "Triste Herencia" ("The Sad Inheri-
tance" ) , and belongs to John E. Berwind. It hung in
the Sunday-school room of the Church of the As-
cension, on Fifth Avenue; yet few knew that New

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Leon

York possessed this masterpiece. The "sad inheri-
tance" has come to a number of crippled or imbecile
boys who are being watched over by a priest as they
take their bath on the beach at Valencia that has lost
all the gladsomeness of Sorolla's other beach pieces.
Here again the artist displays his marvelous powers
of draftsmanship. There is a boy in the right-
hand corner of the picture shading his eyes from the
sun, the modeling of whose figure, simply indicated
by the shadow on his stomach, is quite extraordinary,
and that of other boys on crutches is no less re-
markable.

The largest canvas in the exhibition, "Oxen Ready
to Beach Fishing-Boats," is so full of brilliant draw-
ing and painting that if we once started to describe
them we should not know where to stop, — what with
the modeling of the great bellying sail, of the oxen,
and especially of their hind quarters, the quality of
the sea and the action of the figures; and the same
virtues are to be found in 316, one of the many
"Playa de Valencia" ; and in the "Return from Fish-
ing" (102).

When we come to Sorolla as a portrait-painter,
especially when he is painting royalties and grandees,
we find him less great. The sun-lighted pieces may
have bewildered us. He appears to be very rarely in

C'77]

sympathy with his model. And, as we have said be-
fore, he dislikes painting indoors. One of the two
portraits of the King of Spain, that in which he
wears a hussar uniform, is an outdoor picture, with
the sun playing on his Majesty's features, but it is
no longer the sun that shone on the beach at Valencia.
Another outdoor portrait, that of Madrazo, the
painter, is more satisfactory, but still we do not rec-
ognize in it the Sorolla we have been wandering with
along "The Playa." We find him again, however, in
"Maria at La Granja," dressed in white and delight-
fully simple, and, if it is not exactly the real Sorolla,
we detect a fine portrait-painter in a picture of Senora
Sorolla promenading in a garden where some mas-
terly work in black and white is shown. The picture
of the young Queen of Spain in white satin, wearing
an ermine cloak, ropes of pearls, a small crown, and
pearl and diamond ornaments, and with a deep crim-
son background, is hard. The little picture of the
baby Prince of the Asturias is charming, but still not
Sorolla, and the same may be said of an excellent
likeness of the Queen's mother. Princess Henry of
Battenberg, dressed in black and wearing many
diamonds. But we come across the great master of
color again in certain landscapes in "The Yellow
Tree, La Granja," in "The Seven Peaks," and in the

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tones of yellow in the "Walls of Segovia," and in
"The Clamores."

Before closing this criticism, it is only fair to say
that there was exhibited in Paris the portrait of a
mounted general, which was generally conceded to
prove Sorolla a worthy successor as a portrait-painter
of Velazquez and Goya.

(From the New York Herald, February 7, 1909.)
AMERICAN receptiveness to art has been shown in
various ways this season. At present, with the second
biennial exhibition in the Corcoran Gallery in Wash-
ington, recently closed, the annual exhibition of the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, in Philadelphia,
in progress, and the National Academy of Design,
which already has held its winter exhibition, prepar-
ing-to hold its regular annual show, opportunity also
is offered to view two exhibitions of foreign art.
These are the contemporary German art show in the
Metropolitan Museum and the exhibition of work by
a noted Spanish artist, Mr. Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida,
in the Hispano- American Museum, in I56th Street,
west of Broadway.

That peace hath its victories no less than war is
illustrated in the fact that Spain since its disastrous

£183:1

conflict with America has begun a new conquest in
art. The influence of contemporary Spanish art is
making itself felt more strongly, and that one of the
leaders in this art should be invited to America to
exhibit is in itself significant.

Under the title "A Great Spanish Artist" Mr.
Charles M. Kurtz some time ago contributed to
"Scribner's Magazine" what still remains one of the
most comprehensive articles on Mr. Sorolla's work
written by an American. The St. Louis Museum of
Fine Arts owns this Spanish painter's picture, "An-
other Marguerite," and this, as well as many other
examples of Mr. Sorolla's work, may be seen repro-
duced in Mr. Kurtz's essay. "Another Marguerite"
is tragic in subject. In execution it emphasizes the
pathos rather than the dramatic possibilities of the
theme and is sad and somber. But his subjects are
most varied and often full of life and gaiety. Some
passages in Mr. Kurtz's article, quoted at the time,
but especially significant now, are for this reason
worth calling attention to again.

"No other living painter," says Mr. Kurtz, "sur-
passes Sorolla in his representations of light and at-
mosphere. He is especially fond of out-door sub-
jects— views along the coast, fisher people, boatmen,
boats with sails filled by the breeze, women with

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skirts blown by the wind, naked children playing in
the surf, sturdy oxen with ropes attached pulling up
boats on the sands. In his genre pictures he studies
mostly the common people and paints them to the
life. Indeed, all his work is instinct with vitality. He
seems to imbibe something of the essence of whatever
he studies and to involve it in his representations.
No other painter seems to cover such tremendous
range of subjects or to show such variety in his tech-
nic."

(The Nation, February n, 1909.)

SOROLLA Y BASTIDA

PRECEDED by a heightening fame in Europe, which
was accentuated by the success of exhibits of his
paintings in both Paris and London, the Spanish
artist, Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, is now to be seen in
New York. More than 350 of his pictures and
sketches are on view at the Museum of the Hispanic
Society of America, where they will remain till
March 8th. It is a collection extraordinary for range
and brilliancy. To have produced at forty-six so
great a body of mature work indicates uncommon
fertility; to have attained such striking results argues
C'89]

genius. Sorolla's method is that of a modified im-
pressionism, but such a seeing eye as his must be,
such a rapid and sure technic, would have made
him a great artist under almost any method. His
painting seems absolutely direct. Critics are putting
microscopes upon Velazquez's canvas, to see if they
can discover anything like niggling under the broad
free sweep of his' brush, but it would occur to no one
to apply such a test to Sorolla. His stroke is obviously
as unwavering as that of a piston, the pure color
being laid on in one jet. There is no fussing; all is
immediate, the drawing, the modeling, being got by
the swift use of the final color. He is called a
triumph of the "new" school, but such great gifts as
his would have glorified any school.

If definitions must be sought, Sorolla is not so
much an artist of the plcin air as of the full sun. His
greatest mastery lies in rendering the highest notes
of the Spanish sun. Especially powerful are his
paintings of sea and sand in the brightest light, with
fishing boats, and oxen to draw them up, and bathers
and children playing on the beach or splashing in the
water or racing into the wave or emerging from the
bath — all under the sun of Valencia or San Sebastian
or Biarritz. Many of the paintings dealing with
these favorite subjects of Sorolla are positive tours

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de force, which simply leave the gazer astounded at
the artist's extraordinary talent. It seems as if he
had discovered a new way of fixing instantaneously
in paint not only form and color, but motion. In
such a picture as "Alegria del Mar," the happy dash
of the naked boys into the surf is life caught in the
act, while the turned face of the youngster deepest in,
with the one line of white to show where his teeth
gleam in joy, is the keynote to the whole. In land-
scapes away from the sea, or under more somber
skies, Sorolla is not always so victorious; but flood
him with sunlight, and he will flood you. Even in his
portraits, he seems to desire to get his sitter out into
the sun. One of his best is that of a gentleman sit-
ting in strong light among bright flowers in his
garden. The full length of the King of Spain, clad
in brilliant uniform, is done out under the open sky,
with an effect, as one bystander remarked, as if the
King had swallowed sunshine and it was oozing from
him at every pore. A much more powerful rendering
of Alfonso's face is the darker one painted indoors,
which for its unshrinking revelation of melancholy
struggling through the mask of youth, and its air of
a fatal heredity adding gloom to every feature, might
well have been given the name which Sorolla has
applied to his large picture of crippled children on

C'95]

the seashore, "Triste Herencia." The portrait of Me-
nendez y Pelayo, done last year, is equally masterful.
The entire exhibit is a noteworthy event in this art
season. Sorolla is certain to provoke wide discussion,
in which admiration will be a common ground of all
disputants, whatever their differences. It is said that
his pictures may be shown in Boston, and possibly in
other cities. If so, one can predict a new Spanish
conquest of America.

(The New York World, February 13, 1909.)

SOROLLA'S 300 SUNNY SPANISH
PICTURES

A LOCAL TIDAL WAVE OF ENTHUSIASM OVER A GREAT
IMPRESSIONIST PAINTER — SUN WORSHIP IN COLOR
— THE ROMANCE-LAND OF CERVANTES IS HERE
GORGEOUSLY REVEALED.

JOAQUIN SOROLLA Y BASTIDA, a sun-worshiping im-
pressionist painter from the country of Velazquez,
Spagnoletto, Murillo, and Goya, came to New York
in foggy February with some 300 of his pictures.
The expected — nay, the inevitable — has happened.
In little more than a fortnight's time, what might
have been in some circumstances a mere ripple of

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artistic interest has risen to a tidal wave of en-
thusiasm. And the effect bears true and just relation
to the cause — for this is undoubtedly the most bril-
liant and stunning "one-man show" to which art-
loving Manhattan has ever yet been treated.

Every day, Sundays and holidays included, rain or
shine, morning and evening alike, the general public
go, literally by thousands, to the new museum build-
ing of the Hispanic Society, which stands like a
temple on a noble eminence overlooking the Hudson
at One Hundred and Fifty-sixth Street— surely the
"farthest north" for picture exhibitions.

It is safe to say that more than wonted satisfaction
over the city's acquisition of art treasures will be felt
in the announcement that a number of the most im-
portant of Sorolla's canvases are to remain here per-
manently. These include the grand, Homeric
"Beaching the Boats" — with the loose sails bellying
in the sun and breeze, and big brown oxen at their
toil amidst the swirling breakers of the joyous blue
sea — and the striking group of Leonese peasants,
with their gaily-caparisoned donkey; which two rep-
resentative works, it is rumored, are destined for the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Hispanic Society
also has acquired a number of the portraits and his-
toric landscape scenes.

As for the "Triste Herencia" ("Sad Inheritance"),
the most thoughtful and outwardly somber of all
Sorolla's pictures, showing a score or so of naked,
weak, and crippled boys, some of them on crutches,
the inmates of an asylum for the cast-off children of
depraved or delinquent parents, enjoying their pa-
thetic imitation of a happy moment in a summer sea
bath, under the Christlike charge of a stalwart
priest, robed in black— this eloquent sermon in paint
already belongs in New York. It is owned by Mr.
John E. Berwind, and, when not on public view,
hangs in the Sunday-school room of the Church of
the Ascension, Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street.

The present Sorolla exhibition in its entirety—
which the artist himself says is the largest and best
showing of his work ever brought together— is to re-
main in New York only until March 8th, when it
will be followed by a similar exhibition of the paint-
ings of another great contemporaneous Spaniard,
Ignacio Zuloaga.

Entering the hall of the Hispanic Society, you in-
stinctively shade your eyes— for you seem suddenly
to be standing in the full blaze of a meridional sun-
light. Right in front of you stands his young
majesty, Alfonso XIII, King of Spain, in a gorgeous
hussar uniform that almost requires to be looked at
through smoked goggles.

Above and all around stretches a marvelously ani-
mated panorama of his kingdom — the Spain of to-
day— interspersed with occasional glimpses of the
romance-land we read of in Cervantes, Balzac, Victor
Hugo, and Prosper Merimee. Here are portraits of
royal and noble personages, hidalgos, caballeros,
grandees, peasants, gipsies, soldiers, sailors, fisher-
men, statesmen, writers, artists, scientists, queens and
Carmens, mothers and children— the latter mostly
naked and sun-browned, running along the sea-beach
of Valencia, or disporting themselves in clear green
waters through which their bodies glimmer, a revela-
tion of superb draftsmanship and magical, swift
brushing in of color — white sails flashing on a purple
sea, Moorish bridges over the storied Tagus, flowers
and oranges and pomegranates gleaming amidst dark-
green masses of foliage, love's young dream in pagan
sunlight and on golden sands, the tender anxious joys
of motherhood and babyhood, proud old beggar-
ruffians in ragged cloaks drinking red wine, boat-
builders, net-menders, and sail-makers on the quays
or along shore, girls sorting raisins, and the scenes
and occupations of orchard and grange, contrasted
with the languorous luxury of aristocratic interiors.
All these presentments and many more seem to have
sprung spontaneously from Sorolla's eager brain and
responsive master hand.

t>7]

Here, in fact, is Sorolla's autobiography, vividly
inscribed in paint. Nine tenths of the scenes are his
native Valencia or the shores of Biarritz and San
Sebastian. The charming children are his own, and
the beautiful senora whom he depicts so often and
so sympathetically is their mother, Dona Clotilde
Garcia, the artist's beloved wife. From the intimate
quality of many of the portraits of high personages
one might guess what is indeed the fact, that the
friendship of rank and nobility is Sorolla's at his
command, while he is still in early middle life (he
was born in 1863) and in the zenith of his powers.

No more rapid, sure and vivid painter ever made a
dash at the problems of light and motion and got
away with them with such eclat. Sorolla is always
trying, for the sake of truth and unity of impression,
to paint a complete picture at a single sitting — and
more often than not he has succeeded in this consum-
mate tour de force. Ever since as a boyish student
he painted his first academic picture in the open bull
ring of Valencia he has been possessed by the passion
for light and laughter and color.

Coming in, tired, the other evening — for even
now, here in New York, Sorolla counts that clay lost
in which he does not achieve six or eight hours' work
on a portrait or something— the impressionable
Spaniard fairly embraced an otherwise severe and

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Puerto de Javea

professional gentleman because he chanced to have
on a bright red necktie !

It was a propitious moment for cigarettes and con-
fidences.

"Have you considered," said Senor Sorolla to "The
World" representative, "why you have such artists as
Sargent, Chase, and the late Whistler ? It is because
the real founder of American art was that supreme
impressionist master, Velazquez. The men I have
named, like Constable and Turner and Courbet before
them, seize greatness by that same ecstatic swiftness
of execution which was the secret of Velazquez's
splendid triumphs of realism. As for myself, I can
assure you this lyrical impetuosity came to me as
naturally as breathing or the beatings of my heart, at
the earliest dawn of my sympathy with nature.

"All inspired painters are impressionists, even
though it be true that some impressionists are not
inspired.

"If ever painter wrought a miracle of illusion with
brush and pigment that painter was Velazquez in his
'Las Meninas,' at the Prado in Madrid. Now, I
have studied this picture with a lens, and what do I
find? Why, that Velazquez got that marvelous at-
mospheric background by one broad sweep of his
flowing brush, charged with thin color— so thin that
you can feel the very texture of the canvas through it.

"Nature, the sun itself, produces color effects on
this same principle, but instantaneously. The im-
pression of these evanescent visions is what we make
desperate attempts to catch and fix by any means at
hand. At such moments I am unconscious of mate-
rials, of style, of rules, of everything that intervenes
between my perception and the object or idea per-
ceived.

"No, mes amis, impressionism is not charlatanry,
nor a formula, nor a school. I should say rather it
is the bold resolve to throw all those things over-
board."

By an extraordinary coincidence, which may be-
come historic, Sargent's wondrous water-colors, no
less than eighty-six of them, have been shown at
Knoedler's, simultaneously with the Sorolla exhibi-
tion—and they absolutely confirm the Spaniard's
contention.

Only after contemplating and comparing these two
epoch-making modern masters, if you should happen
to look in upon a bunch of Barbizons at Schaus's, or
even upon the French impressionists at Durand-
Ruel's, you will be astonished to find how black, how
positively medieval, the latter appear for the moment
to your sun-dazzled eyes.

HENRY TYRRELL.

La Concha, San Sebastian

San Sebastiar

271

San Sebastian

272

(The American Art News, February 13, 1909.)

AN ARTISTIC REVELATION

To this dull art season has suddenly come a sensation
in the exhibition opened this week at the Hispanic
Museum of the works of the modern Spanish master,
Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida. While some few Ameri-
can art lovers and students of contemporary art
movements in Europe have known of the amazing
power, color quality, and dramatic strength of So-
rolla's canvases, few even of these have seen more
than some scattered examples of his work, while the
American art public was not prepared for what is a
virtual revelation— in this display.

There is every evidence that the New York public,
never indifferent to really great music, art, or litera-
ture, will respond enthusiastically to the Hispanic
Society's splendid enterprise in presenting to it the
work of so great a modern master.

It is only to be regretted that after its close here
the exhibition cannot be repeated in the larger cities
of the country.

(The American Art News, February 13, 1909.;

A SPANISH MASTER'S WORKS

To the credit of busy New York it must be said
that its more cultivated element has quickly appre-
ciated the beauty and value of the most remarkable
and fascinating "one-man" exhibition of pictures
ever made in this country, and has already begun to
crowd during the daylight and even evening hours,
the handsome and artistic museum of the Hispanic
Society of America in i56th Street. This, with a
prodigality of expense and great care and taste,
has been so arranged in its interior— for it is
really a library more than an art gallery— so as to
display the works of the Spanish painter to the best
advantage, with harmonious coloring of walls, and
admirable arrangement of lights, both at day and
evening. The exhibition, which opened on Monday
last to the public, and which, after its close here on
March 8th, will go to the Albright Art Gallery at
Buffalo, to be succeeded by an exhibition of twenty-
two selected canvases by another great contemporary
Spanish painter, Ignacio Zuloaga— called the Spanish
Manet — and which is now on at Buffalo, is composed
of 350 numbers, of which over a hundred are small

[220]

Playa de Valencia

274

Playa de Valencia

Playa de Valencia

276

Playa de Valencia

277

sketches, but each and every one so characteristic, so
beautiful in color, so virile and full of sunlight and
air, as to call for the closest study.

PAINTER OF SUNLIGHT AND AIR

IT is difficult to restrain a possible exuberance of ex-
pression, or to qualify one's admiration in attempting
to describe the art of Sorolla. There are those who
do not hesitate to place him very close to his early
predecessor, the great master Velazquez, and who
say that, except in portraiture, he excels his other
great predecessor, Goya, but no artist or art lover,
be he tonalist, impressionist, realist, or romanticist,
can fail to be at least amazed by the marvelous vi-
tality and simplicity of the art of Sorolla. He is
essentially, to give him his definite place, a colorist,
and he is also a great draftsman, and the most
successful painter of sunlight, atmosphere, and air
that possibly the world has ever seen. And his work
is truthful— truthful in drawing, in action, and in
every detail. Notice the baby boy in "At the Bath,"
"Running Along the Beach," with the movement and
action of the children and its light and air, and the
"After the Bath," with the sunlight filtering through
the white sheet which the boy is holding up over the
laughing girl in her wet bathing dress. Notice the

muscles of the straining oxen in the great museum
picture, which should without question find a resting
place in our own Metropolitan — the color of the sea
and the movement of the figures. And through it all
one feels the breeze blow, and is gripped by the dra-
matic intensity of the scene.

A brother painter of Sorolla says that he never
makes a correction in his drawing, and that "he
paints with the hand of God." Certainly his is in-
spired art, in that it meets the test of all inspired art
— the power to move, to thrill, to hold, the spectator.

HIS HUMAN SIDE

WHILE as a rule Sorolla paints the joyousness of
life, the summer and the sun, he can be sad and
tragic, too, and in this very versatility he evinces his
deep sympathy with humanity in its sufferings, as
well as in its joys. One of the most moving pictures
in the world — certainly one of the most impressive
of modern masterpieces of art— is "The Sad Inheri-
tance," that canvas fortunately owned by the Church
of the Ascension in this city, which depicts a group of
naked laughing urchins sporting in the surf on the
Valencia beach, while in the foreground four little
cripples, also nude and desirous of a bath, are pre-

278

279

San Sebastiar

Playa cle Valenci

vented by their infirmities from joining their fellows.
One poor boy, supported by crutches, bows his head
and weeps, while a kindly young priest in attendance
lays his hand sadly and in sorrowing sympathy on
his head.

AS PORTRAIT-PAINTER

IT is as a portrait-painter that Sorolla appears to less
advantage. He could not paint a bad portrait, for
he draws too well and correctly, and his color is too
good to allow even this artistic Homer to nod to any
extent, but with the exception of his sketch of the
young King of Spain (the half-length, not the full-
length, which is not so good), and the life-size, full-
length seated portrait of his fellow-painter, Madrazo,
his portraits are not convincing, while that of the
young Queen of Spain, in white satin with an ermine
cloak, is distinctly hard. But the portraits need not
detain one— there is too much to see and admire in
the painter's other works.

HIS LIFE HISTORY

A WORD in closing as to the life history of the modest
little middle-aged man, born in Valencia, Spain, only
forty-seven years ago, and who, now here, bids fair

to become a lion against his will. He was left an
orphan when only two years old, adopted by an aunt,
the wife of a locksmith, and spent his time making
drawings in copy books. Although he was taken
away from school and placed by his uncle in the
latter's workshop, he was permitted to attend draw-
ing classes, and when fifteen to study art. He en-
tered the academy at Valencia, and at once won the
prize for color, drawing, and perspective. A Senor
Garcia became interested in the boy and paid his way
for several years in the academy. The painter after-
ward married his patron's daughter. His pictures
attracted no attention when first exhibited, but the
"Second of May," a scene of the Spanish War of
Independence, and painted in the open air, when
shown at Madrid, brought him fame. Then he went
to Rome on a scholarship and afterward to Paris.
When his "Fishing Boats Returning" was purchased
for the Luxembourg from the Salon, he first reached
universal fame. Since then he has gone on conquer-
ing and to conquer.

The exhibition is not only, as said above, a revela-
tion, but is the most important and interesting event
of the present art season.

JAMES B. TOWNSEND.

San Sebastian

28l

San Sebastian

282

Playa de Valencia

283

Playa de Valencia

284

(From an article in the New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, February

14, 1909, entitled "Die hispanische Gesellschaft von

Amerika. Von A. von Ende.")

... So war mir das Ziel dieses Unternehmens
klar geworden und ich war kaum davon iiberrascht,
dass die Gesellschaft in ihren Bemiihungen das Ver-
standnis hispanischer Kultur zu f ordern, es auch unter-
nommen. uns mit der modernen spanischen Kunst
bekannt zu rnachen. Es war eine gliickliche Idee, die
Herrn Huntington veranlasste, zur Einfuhrung in
dieselbe Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida zu wahlen, dessen
Kunst weniger die dem Auslander sattsam bekann-
ten und ihm gewaltsam erscheinenden Ausserungen
des Nationaltemperaments, als das ruhig dahinglei-
tende Alltagsleben des Durchschnittsvolkes darstellt.
Keine Stierkampfe, keinen Torreador, keine Carmen
sieht man auf den Bildern, die wahrend des am 8.
Marz ablaufenden Monats an Stelle der oben er-
wahnten Gemalde getreten sind. Hat die Zeit jene
nachgedunkelt und sie zu typischen Dokumenten der
Vergangenheit gemacht, so geniigt jetzt ein einziger
Blick in den Ausstellungssaal, einem den Eindruck
neuen, bliihenden, sonnigen, farbenfrischen Gegen-
wartlebens zu ubermitteln. Der kiinstlerische Werth
der Ausstellung ist ein ungleicher. Es ist zu viel da,

und mancherlei Unfertiges, das in des Kiinstlers Ate-
lier hatte bleiben konnen. Aber der lichte, sonnige
Charakter, die naive Freude am rein Thatsachlichen
und Greifbaren, die diesen Bildern eigen, beriihrt
einen wie frischer Seewind oder wie scharfe Hohen-
luft. Man ist versucht, hinter dieser Kunst eine bei-
nahe robuste Gesundheit und ein sanguinisches Tem-
perament zu vermuthen, der die Erscheinung und
Personlichkeit des mit seiner Gattin nach New York
gekommenen Kiinstlers kaum entspricht, wohl aber
besteht eine innige Beziehung zwischen des Kiinstlers
schlichter, ruhiger Sprechweise und der einfachen,
man mochte beinahe sagen, sachlichen Sprache, die
sein Pinsel fiihrt.

Es ist in dieser Anhaufung von Bildern eine iiber-
raschende Mannigfaltigkeit an Motiven aus dem
Leben der Durchschnittsmenschheit. Seilbinder,
Heuernte in Asturien, Traubenbriihen, Einziehen der
Segel, Riickkehr vom Fischfang, Krabbenfischer,
Segelflicken, Rosinenpacken, Trocknen der Netze,
Schwimmer, Badende und zwischen durch und iiber-
all Kinder, spielende, badende, feierlich bekleidete
und paradiesisch nackte Kinder. Stellte man alle
diese Kinderbilder zusammen, so ergabe sich ein far-
bengliihender, sonnenlichter, sinnesfreudiger Hymnus
auf die Fruchtbarkeit, vor einer beinahe primitiven

Frische und Urspriinglichkeit. Einige dieser Kinder-
gestalten sind kostlich in Zeichnung wie Farbe. Mit
Ausnahme der Portraits ist nirgends auch nur der
geringste Versuch gemacht, der Natur durch Kompo-
sition nachzuhelfen. Es sind beinahe wortliche Uber-
tragungen der Wirklichkeit und es ist eine heitere,
lebensfrohe Wirklichkeit. Nur einmal beriihrt der
Kunstler die Tragik des Menschenlebens, von der die
Kindheit nicht verschont ist, in dem grossen Ge-
malde, das in dem kleineren Nebenraum hangt und
"Ein trauriges Erbe" genannt ist. Da stehen an dem
Strande von Valencia, dessen Wasser in den iibrigen
Bildern so sonnig durchleuchtet sind, hier aber eine
beinahe bleierne diistere Farbung haben, die freud-
losen, verkriippelten und verwaisten Kinder eines
Asyls unter Aufsicht des schiitzenden Priesters ein
Bild trostlosen, erschiitternden Elends. Sonst sieht
der Kunstler nur mit dem Auge des Malers, der die
sich ihm darbietende Natur, die Wirklichkeit wieder-
giebt; hier aber hat das Herz des Menschenfreundes
mitgesprochen.

Sorolla erinnert einen an das Wort des franzosi-
schen Kritikers, der von Velazquez gesagt : "Le
peintre, le plus peintre qui fut jamais." und man
mochte hinzufiigen "et rien que peintre." Denn er
ist Maler und nichts als Maler ; weder Denker noch
Dichter, weder Prediger noch Fantast: weder Ro-

mantiker noch Problematiker. Er griibelt nicht, er
schaut und malt. Er berechnet vielleicht nicht ein-
mal seine Wirkungen, so unbekiimmert, so keck,
scheint alles au-f die Leinwand hingeworfen. Seine
Farbenskala ist auf wenige Tone beschrankt; Xuan-
cen kennt er nicht. Er hat keine komplizirte moderne
Psyche. Oder aber er will nur das Einfache in
Lebensausserungen und menschlichen Empfindungen
sehen und alles Sensitive und Raffinirte vermeiden.
Es ist als ob dieser Moderne gegen Vieles protestirte,
was man modern nennt, und was in der That eine
durchaus naturliche kiinstlerische Ausserung in der
gegenwartigen Generation schlummernder Gedanken
und sich durch ganze Schichten der Menschheit hin-
ziehender Gefiihlsstromungen ist. Es liegt wie Be-
jahung des materiellen, gesund sinnlichen Lebens in
alien diesen Strandbildern mit spielenden Kindern,
mit lustwandelnden Madchen und Jiinglingen, mit
Badenden und Schwimmern. Es liegt sogar viel-
leicht ein philosophisches Sichfugen in das Unaban-
derliche in den Volksszenen, den Interieurs, wo die
Frauen iiber die Arbeit gebeugt dasitzen und in jenen
Kustenbildern, wo Mensch und Vieh mit Anstren-
gung aller ihrer Kraft sich der Brandling entgegen-
stemmen. Auch in den Landschaften, die in der
Sammlung an Zahl schwach vertreten sind, spiirt
man nichts davon, dass der Kiinstler sich etwa be-

Xifio desnudo, Granja

288

Senora de Sorolla (negro)

miiht habe, diese oder jene Stimmung hervorzu-
bringen. Und doch liegt in manchen derselben
Stimmung, und hatte durch feinere Nuancirung wir-
kungsvoll hervorgehoben warden und auf den
Beschauer riickwirken konnen. Einzelne Portraits
zeugen von Scharfblick fur das Wesentliche und
Charakteristische. Das lebensgrosse Bild der Dame
in Schwarz ist ein Beispiel ; das Portrait der Infanta
Isabel ein noch bedeutenderes. Hingegen kommen
die Majestaten bei Signer Sorolla wie so haufig in
den Portraits selbst der grossten Meister weniger
gut davon. Man kann sich nichts Nichtssagenderes
vorstellen als die Bilder der beiden koniglichen
Hoheiten.

Die Ausstellung, die zur Zeit eine Menge von Be-
suchern nach dem Gebaude zieht, von dessen Existenz
sie vielleicht keine Ahnung gehabt haben, hinterlasst
einen lichten, frischen Eindruck. Sie ist geeignet,
einem anschaulich zu machen, dass Spanien nicht das
Land mondsuchtiger Romantik und auch nicht das
Land blutiger Volksbelustigungen ist, wie man es
sich gern vorstellt. Die grosse Masse des Volkes ist
iiberall gesund und bleibt sich uberall gleich. In
gewisser Beziehung ist dies eine trostliche Erkennt-

(The Newark Evening News, February 20, 1909.)

JOAQUIN SOROLLA Y BASTIDA

IT grieves The Optimist to report that he has found
nothing in the galleries to compare with Sorolla's
work, but he is comforted by his optimism. It will
not always be so. That great gladness of color that
is Sorolla's! it is wonderful. He is one of the few
great living painters, and, happily, the exhibition of
his paintings at the Hispanic Museum, I56th street,
near the Subway station, will be continued until
March 8th.

The Optimist would like to linger long enough to
outline Sorolla's artistic pedigree, but that is impossi-
ble to-day. Biographical details will be found in the
introduction to the catalogue. Bastien-Lepage and
Menzel affected Sorolla profoundly, but he also went
to Barbizon. He sprang from the loins of Velazquez
and Goya. Strongly influenced by many individuals,
he has an individuality of his own ; an eclectic, choos-
ing method and technic where he will, he makes his
own school. But let us not labor over the causes that
made him great; let us enjoy what we are privileged
to enjoy.

Sorolla is a painter of the world that he sees : a

Excelentisimo Seiior Duque de Alba

great impressionist, a true realist. And he has a
happy habit of looking at the world in which the sun
shines. It is possible to stretch this claim so as to
cover "The Sad Inheritance." In the foreground is
the beach at Valencia. For the moment the happy chil-
dren, fisherfolks and sail-sewers have been banished.
A score or so of imbecile or crippled boys— the ana-
tomical deformities are superbly mastered— the
cast-off children of depraved and unknown parents,
huddle about the good priest whose life is consecrated
to the alleviation of the sufferings caused by the sins
of the parents. For the joyless child, denied the
gaiety of healthy boyhood, there is some one that
cares, and Sorolla could not paint the sorrow of it
without putting the solace into the very center.

But that is not the sunshine that characterizes his
work. It is the light that rays from Old Sol himself.
"In order to express the subtle yet intense vibrations
of the sunlight," Bereute says, "Sorolla sometimes
uses crisp, small touches of the brush, though not in
the extravagant fashion of the French impressionists.
He saw and absorbed all that is healthy in the various
phases of impressionism; and so, in painting land-
scape, he banishes from his palette black or blackish,
non-transparent colors, such as were formerly in
vogue for rendering shadow. But, on the other hand,

[255 ]

his canvases contain a great variety of blues and vio-
lets balanced and juxtaposed with reds and yellows.
These, and the skilful use of white, provide him with
a color scheme of great simplicity, originality, and
beauty."

The color— the translucent color— of Sorolla is
tremendous, but what a shame it is that no gallery is
at hand that provides proper distance. Take No. 72,
"Helen Among the Roses," for an illustration. It
makes no appeal whatever until it is glimpsed from
the upper gallery— this is the best place from which
to view them all— and then it is a vision that woos
by the great loveliness of its color.

But we must make a systematic beginning. His
portraiture is excellent, almost without exception. It
compels one to believe, without knowledge, that the
likenesses are accurate. Looking at No. 88, "In the
Gardens of La Granja," from the other end of the
museum, The Optimist mistook the woman in the pic-
ture for a spectator, and this quality of boldness is
ever apparent.

The portrait of her Majesty the Queen of Spain
is done like a miniature, with a wonderful soft, red
background of inestimable values. The smaller por-
trait of the infant Prince of Asturias is especially
pleasing, a charming thing with the qualities of a

Despues del bano

2Q2

water color. Except for the portraits of Senora So-
rolla, No. V, "Her Royal Highness Dona Ysabel de
Borbon," is more imposing than any other in the exhi-
bition. Sorolla has a great facility for reproducing
fabrics that is manifest not only in the portraits. His
gossamer and diaphanous effects, the wet, clinging
garments of the children and the bathers sublimate
realism. The Optimist liked the picture of the Mother
and Child in bed. It is simply a gray canvas with the
dark heads against pillows and counterpane and with
the mother's outstretched arm. O ye who have babes
of your own ! this is maternity, this is childhood.

Sorolla must love children. On canvas after can-
vas they romp along the beach, dive in the water, or
sprawl on the sands in the sunshine. The water is
too clear to obscure their submerged limbs and bodies.
What action there is in them ! the awkwardness and
the grace of childhood ! Better still, its wholesome,
unconscious innocence : as if the serpent had never
entered the Garden. They are beautifully unashamed.

No. 104, "The Little Girl with Blue Ribbon," will
never tire you, never cease to please. With artless
grace the little girl— such a dainty child, as all little
girls ought to be— stands out in the sunshine on
Valencia's beach. And she stands out, too, as real,
as natural as life and sunshine. Nearby hangs No.

[26I]

68, "Taking in the Sail." The face, the red turban,
the white sail, all gleam in the sunshine that comes to
his brush so irresistibly.

There seems to be no limit to Sorolla's variety and
his industry has furnished an impulse to artists. It
is almost always the light that allures. In the Garden
of the Alcazar, beating against the white walls and
columns of a farmhouse, dancing in the water, play-
ing hide-and-seek through the foliage, glancing from
the body of some lightly-clad child, penetrating sheer
fabrics and pattering hot upon the sands ; always the
sunshine. He is a painter of glad, joyous, free-
hearted, exuberant life. Nowr how could an optimist
fail to be enthusiastic over all this? Sincerity, actu-
ality, sympathy, and swiftness are the qualities of his
work that make it real and lasting and human.

No, there is not all the finish you may think you
wish, all the avoidance of sketchiness. Sorolla him-
self says: "I feel that if I painted slowly, I positively
could not paint at all." He catches the infinite transi-
tions of light and shade and atmosphere and, to ren-
der them, he must work with infinite rapidity. This
is one of the great secrets of his power and his
realism.

[262]

(The Call. New York, February 25, 1909.)

THE SOROLLA EXHIBITION OF
PAINTINGS

THE chill of our gray winter days is soon dispelled
before the pictures of Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, at
the Hispanic Museum, 1561!! Street and Broadway.

Sorolla loves the shine of the scorching Spanish
sun ; he loves the wind which caresses the little chil-
dren who bask in the sun and display their nude
bodies, and it is here that he is happiest. The children
frolic, the wind and sea frolic, and the painter plies
his brush in perfect sympathy with that frolic.

Not that the sterner moods of life fail to fall under
his versatile and dexterous brush. The Spanish sea-
man, bronzed and sturdy, the weary peasant, the way-
farer, the statesman, the scholar, the soldier, are all
"game" to him.

In his struggle for life this Spaniard has met and
known them all intimately. No mere fantasy on his
part. He was the son of humble peasants of Valen-
cia, Spain, who died of cholera two years after Joa-
quin was born. He was adopted by his aunt, the
wife of a locksmith.

The boy's incorrigible love for drawing interfered
[267]

with his work at school and the futile task of edu-
cating him was abandoned. He was put to work in
the shops of his uncle and during the evenings at-
tended a local art school. The hopeless pupil proved
so apt a draftsman that he was taken from the
shop and placed in the Academia de Bellas Artes of
San Carlos. Success followed, and in his rise
through life he encountered all of the classes and
kinds of people that he has painted.

But his greatest sympathy, one can readily see, lies
with those from whom he came. Every mood and
occupation of theirs is known to him. As fishermen
he knows them best. But not only men— sea, sky and
earth, trees and beasts ; in fact, all that the sun lights
on, he paints. Sea and sky, earth and rocks are
enough for him, as in Nos. 13 and 17. Even the hot
sun he often dispenses with, as in the two little gray
landscapes, poems in paint, Nos. 24 and 33. Here
sun is unnecessary. A deep slope, splashed with
flowers, a forest at the bottom of the hill, a patch of
sky and the thing is complete.

In his sunlight pictures, sun and atmosphere change
with the theme he paints. Lurid and harsh is Old
Sol when he throws his rays on the men "Beaching
the Boat" (318). The sail of the boat is painful
and blinding; the bodies of the oxen clumsy and
[268]

296

Excelentisimo Senor Conde de Villagonzalo

heavy, as in nature. But when the sun lights on the
backs of nude tots lying or playing on the beach,
wading or swimming, or on slightly-clad boys and
girls running along the beach, it is delicate and de-
lightful.

This love for the sun is unique. It reveals a man
of sunny temperament. It is a physical sun, unlike
the sun of Rembrandt, which was used to pierce
shadowy gloom and reveal the torment of the artist's
soul. Sorolla is not spiritual in that sense. Nor does
he clamor for the ideal. On the contrary, he is
poignantly real, showing to man the delights of this
beautiful world.

He is alienated from past traditions in art. His
works are no mere arrangements in line, color, or
mass. He does not seem to compose, Nature com-
poses for him. With her he is in absolute sympathy.
He paints rapidly, passionately, suggestively the Spain
he knows and loves. All is Spanish in the exhibit.
His craft is big, vigorous, and healthy, ' sacrificing
detail for mass, but never missing the salient features
which make character. In this rendition he is won-
derful, often sustaining himself thereby when his
color is not so fortunate as in some of his indoor
portraits.

The portrait of his wife in black dress (288)

is perhaps the best example of subtile painting in the
whole exhibition. The figure of the charming woman
is slightly posed and the canvas is somewhat "ar-
ranged," but I know of few modern pictures that are
more delicately modeled; especially the head, which
is a marvel of sympathetic painting. So, also, is his
"Senorita Dona Maria Sorolla." Here he cajoled
the brush into slipping one form into another. It is
snappy, crisp, and lovely. Numbers of portraits
other than these grace the walls of the museum and
attest the skill of the artist.

In his "Valencian Fisherwomen" (84), some-
thing more than skill and character is felt. The
painter is free again. The picture is filled with glo-
rious sunlight alighting on the gossiping women and
on the boats in back of them. Here, as in his
"Beach of Valencia by Morning Light" (307), one is
drawn into the actual. In the latter canvas we envy
the youngsters divested of their clothes and bathing
in the water or broiling their wet bodies in sunshine.

The breeze blows hard on the sails yonder, the
water rolls on the beach. The canvas is full of humor,
the stubborn little nudity in the foreground refuses to
be lifted off the sand to the delight of all concerned.
The fresh morning air is cool and inviting. Its
humor recalls to one "Playing in the Water"
(306). Here the tenderness of childhood is treated.

The little babe is altogether at the mercy of the older
playmate, but was never in more loving hands.

THE DELIGHTFUL "SEA IDYL"

PERHAPS the most delightful of these sunlight pic-
tures is the one called a "Sea Idyl," a song of sun-
shine and youth. Two children, a boy and a girl,
lie at the edge of the water, lolling in the calm, soft
air. He, less timid than she, is almost completely
immersed, contented with the roll of the warm water
over his body. She but touches the water with her
legs, to which a wet garment clings tightly. The
forms of the soft flesh lose and find themselves in the
light, and Sorolla has followed carefully these notes
which interpret that action of light on form.

This suggestive modeling is one of the great
problems of modern painting that the Spaniard has
conquered. The drawing of the two figures is strong
and true, and a light, airy color tones the canvas.
The charming childishness of both children chatting
with each other throws off for a moment thought of
the suffering children we know.

THE "SAD INHERITANCE"

BUT Sorolla, the seeker of the actual, in his love for
healthy children, happily situated, the glowing sun

4

and frolicking sea and wind, has not forgotten the
water over which the wind is hushed, the sky heavy
laden, the sun cool, the children whose sad inheritance
it is to be crippled or imbecile.

His "Sad Inheritance" (350) is a picture of a
priest guarding a lot of deformed boys at their bath.
His duty it is to take the place of the lost mother
and to substitute motherly care. The figure of the
noble priest, with black robe pitched against a dark
and somber sea, occupies a goodly part of the fore-
ground of the picture. He leads one badly deformed
child and several others follow. Their nude bodies
are lighted by the sun, but it is a sad sun, bland, mak-
ing us almost forget the sense of the outdoor. Cool
shadows, taking on reflections, increase the depressing
spirit of the canvas. Blank miles of quiet water
stretch out before us. The limitless sea loses itself
in darkness. Gently it rolls its waves in on the bath-
ers as though careful of the figures that are unable to
frolic along the beach or in its waters. They, many
with crutches to support them, move painfully and
slowly. The head of the priest, barely touched by
light, looks down at the cripple he is leading. Tightly
he holds his charge, whose misshapen leg and torse
show his sad inheritance.

Need we speak of the technical virtues of this can-

vas, which Sorolla has done with a sympathy and re-
serve nowhere surpassed in this collection of pictures ?
And as for motif— here, it is shadow touched by
gloomy light, as though to complement the spirit of
the exhibition.

Of all the 350 paintings not one is more popular;
no other but this destroys whatever happiness we may
possess.

HERMAN BLOCK.

(The Independent, February 25, 1909.)

A GREAT SPANISH PAINTER

NEW YORK has been made to realize two things this
month, of which most of its citizens were before
unaware. One -was the existence and charm of the
building in West I56th Street of the Hispanic So-
ciety of America, founded on good broad lines for
the furtherance of our knowledge of things Span-
ish, and the other is the existence which this
Society again has enabled us to appreciate of a
mighty descendant of the seventeenth-century artists
of Spain in the person of Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida.
The work of Sorolla shows influence from the
great naturalistic wave in French nineteenth-century

art but obviously Velazquez himself was very seri-
ously studied by this modern master of other know-
ledge unknown to Velazquez. Knowledge of light
and movement above all. No photograph can give a
true idea of the brilliant technic of this man, whose
eye seizes and whose hand fixes almost instantly all
the movements and colors and characters to be seen
in his country, especially by its seas. His vision is
always clear, and poetic only as poetry dwells in his
subject matter always; yet his things have other
depth of splendidly virile achievements and of his
school he has no rivals. In portraiture one is tempted
to compare him with Sargent and to feel some
similarity in points of view, but probably his best
portraits are not here, while his best genre works are.
Never has the mother just after the birth of her
child been so touchingly painted as in the large, quiet
toned canvas, showing only the expanse of white
covered bed, with the two heads appearing. The
only darker spots, the mother's head turned in, are
toward the wee mite, with eyes tightly shut. Seldom
has the horror of deformity been so intensely painted
as in the sad colored "Sad Inheritance," with its
foreground group of crippled boys led down to the
sea by the strong, stern priest, whom yet we feel is
sympathetic, though we can see only his back. A

third large canvas, called in English "Oxen Preparing
to Beach Fishing Boats," is as different again as
possible, and such an absolutely true rendering of
one of the sturdiest of activities for men, beasts, and
boats, that it fairly excites one, as would the scene
itself. Then there are beautiful landscapes and many
small sketches of the swimming and wading joys of
young boys and girls he paints so often— merrily,
gracefully, strongly, or in whatever mood the scene
presented itself.

A portrait of Madrazo, the painter, in his garden
is an exceedingly beautiful thing, but the large royal
portraits lack sincerity, as it seems royal portraits
must, though a small one of King Alfonso is char-
acteristic and consequently convincingly ugly. The
exhibition will remain open until March 8th, when it
will be succeeded by a showing of work by another
Spaniard, Zuloaga.

(The Literary Digest, February 27, 1909.)

A PAINTER OF SUNLIGHT

SPAIN is vigorously contesting with Germany for
American admiration of her contemporary art. Vis-
itors to the galleries in New York now divide their

attention between the German exhibition at the
Metropolitan and the works of the Spanish master
Sorolla y Bastida at the Hispanic Museum. Three
hundred and fifty specimens of this artist's work are
shown, and critics and admirers are applauding the
joyous, vital, sunny spirit of this man who chiefly
paints sunshine and love, the frolics of children, and
the play of the waves on the seashore. "No one who
appreciates great painting," says the critic of the
New York "Evening Post," "should miss seeing this
exhibition, for Sorolla is a very great painter; not
one of his brother artists, not one amateur of art who
has seen his work, but ranks him among the greatest
painters of the day." The painter tells you that he
hates darkness. "Claude Monet once said that paint-
ing in general did not have light enough in it. I
agree with him. We painters, however, can never
reproduce sunlight as it really is. I can only approach
the truth of it." Mr. Huneker, in "The Sun" (New
York), looks upon him as "the painter of sunshine
without equal." Admitting no "mincing of com-
parisons," he asserts that "not Turner, not Monet,
painted so directly blinding shafts of sunshine as has
this Spaniard." Of his method Mr. Huneker writes:

"After years of labor he has achieved a personal
vision. It is so completely his that to copy it \vould

1*9*1

be to perpetrate a burlesque. He employs the divi-
sional fetches of Monet, spots, cross-hatchings, big,
saberlike strokes a la John Sargent, indulges in
smooth sinuous silhouettes, or huge splotches, re-
fulgent patches, explosions, vibrating surfaces; sur-
faces that are smooth and oily, surfaces, as in his
waters, that are exquisitely translucent. You can't
pin him clown to a particular formula. His technic
in other hands would be coarse, crashing, brassy,
bald, and too fortissimo. It is not any of these,
though it is too often deficient in the finer modula-
tions. He makes one forget this synthetic technic by
his entrain, sincerity, and sympathy with his subject.
Apart from his luscious, tropical color he is a sober
narrator of facts. Ay, but he is a big chap, this
amiable little Valencian with a big heart and a hand
that reaches out and grabs down clouds, skies, scoops
up the sea, and sets running, wriggling, screaming
a joyful band of naked boys and girls over the
golden summer sands in a sort of ecstatic symphony
of pantheism. Imagine Walt Whitman (omitting
the 'Children of Adam'), Walt when he evokes a
mass of animated youth, and you will faintly gather
the rich colored rhythms of Seiior Sorolla's pictures."

Mr. Huneker thrusts in a caution against suppos-
ing that because of Sorolla's "enormous brio his
general way of entrapping nature is brutal." We get
some further ideas of what appeals to him, and how

he stands in relation to a fellow-painter, Zuloaga,
whose work is to follow his at the same place of ex-
hibition :

"He is masculine and absolutely free from the
neurasthenic morbidezsa of his fellow-countryman,
Zuloaga. (And far from attaining that painter's
inches as a psychologist.) For the delineation of
moods nocturnal, of poetic melancholy, of the con-
templative aspect of life we must not go to Sorolla.
He is not a thinker. He is the painter of bright
mornings and brisk salt breezes. He is half Greek.
There is Winckelmann's Heiterkeit, blitheness, in his
groups of romping children, in their unashamed
bare skins and naive attitudes. Boys on Valencian
beaches evidently believe in Adamic undress. Nor
do the girls seem to care. Stretched upon his stomach
on the beach, a youth, straw-hatted, stares at the
spume of the rollers. His companion is not so un-
conventionally disarrayed, and as she has evidently
not eaten of the poisonous apple of wisdom she is
free from embarrassment. Balzac's two infants,
innocent of their sex, could not be less carefree than
the Sorolla children. How tenderly, sensitively he
models the hardly nubile forms of maidens ! The
movement of their legs as they race the strand, their
dash into the water, or their nervous pausing at the
rim of the wet — here is poetry for you, the poetry of
glorious days in youthland. Curiously enough his
types are for the most part more international than

racial; that is, racial as are Zuloaga's Basque brig-
ands, manolas, and gipsies.

""But only this ? Can't he paint anything but mas-
sive oxen wading to their buttocks in the sea ; or
fisher-boats with swelling sails blotting out the hori-
zon; or a girl after a dip standing, as her boyish
cavalier covers her with a robe—you see the clear
pink flesh through her garb; or vistas of flower-
gardens with roguish maidens and courtly parks ;
peasants harvesting, working women sorting raisins ;
sailors mending nets, boys at rope-making—is all this
great art? Where are the polished surfaces of the
cultured studio worker ; where the bric-a-brac which
we inseparably connect with pseudo-Spanish art?
You will not find any of them. Sorolla with good
red blood in his veins, the blood of a great, misunder-
stood race, paints what he sees on the top of God's
earth. He is not a book- but a nature-poet ; not a vir-
tuoso of the brush but a normal man of genius. He
is in love with light, and by his treatment of relative
values creates the illusion of sun-flooded landscapes.
He does not cry for the 'sun,' as did Oswald Alving;
it comes to him at the beckoning of his brush. His
limitations are but the defects of his good qualities.
Let us not expect a Zuloaga when we have a Sorolla.
Zuloaga comes to us soon; and as Goethe said of
Schiller and himself, 'Germany ought to be proud of
two such big fellows.' This remark applies to Spain,
Sorolla, and Zuloaga as well."

One picture in the collection strikes another note —
"the one sad picture of the collection." In "The
Evening Post" we read of it :

"It is called Triste Herencia' ('Sad Inheritance'),
and belongs to John E. Berwind. It hung in the
Sunday-school room of the Church of the Ascension,
on Fifth Avenue; yet few knew that New York pos-
sessed this masterpiece. The 'sad inheritance' has
come to a number of crippled or imbecile boys who
are being watched over by a priest as they take their
bath on the beach at Valencia that has lost all the
gladsomeness of Sorolla's other beach pieces. Here
again the artist displays his marvelous powers of
draftsmanship. There is a boy in the right-hand cor-
ner of the picture shading his eyes from the sun, the
modeling of whose figure simply indicated by the
shadow on his stomach is quite extraordinary, and
that of other boys on crutches is no less remarkable."

(The Cincinnati Times-Star, February 27, 1909.)

A GREAT SPANISH PAINTER IN
NEW YORK

IF it were possible to write an adequate account of the
Sorolla exhibition, it would be of doubtful kindness
to any one who was not to see the pictures. It would

[304 ]

simply make such an one disgusted with fate and the
writer for creating a hunger not to be satisfied.
Three hundred and fifty paintings, big and little, all
by one man, all in one building, and not an uninter-
esting one in the lot! Standing in the presence of
this amazing display, it is impossible for any one with
a grain of art in his nature to remain unmoved. If
you have never cared for pictures before, here is the
provocation for an awakening. But if you are al-
ready infatuated with things beautiful, have a care
how you drink of the wine of life which this wonder-
ful Spaniard offers you.

Surrounded by the pictures, it is impossible to think
or talk in moderation. It goes to the head instantly
with the finest of intoxications. Here is the work of
a man surcharged with the joy of things and of life
to an unparalleled degree. So many people coming
into the room exclaim : "Why, I had no idea it was
like this. It 's not like anything I ever saw before.
Just look at the color. Look at that girl coming out
of the water, and see those boats; why he paints
landscapes, too, and the portrait of the King. Why
he paints everything. What a cunning baby!"

This is an excerpt merely. What Sorolla has not
recorded of life would be hard to tell. He is one of
the most comprehensive, omniverous. and artistically

[309;]

successful painters the world has ever seen. Until
this showing of his work, but very few in America
knew him, even by name. The present exhibition is
beyond all manner of doubt one of the most important
events in our entire art history. When one realizes
that the pictures are assembled here for only a period
of a few weeks, it incites to further extravagances of
thought. For instance, that the nation should rise en
masse, purchase the entire collection as the greatest
lesson in art it has ever had, and then delegate its
most alluring orator to call upon Senor Sorolla and
persuade him that he could find a congenial working
home in America. So we should be in a fair way to
be born again, to assure for America a true renais-
sance. It is heart-breaking to think of this oppor-
tunity for development, for intellectual advancement,
for riding the crest of the highest tide of life, slipping
away from us. At most only a few thousand souls
will read this sermon in paint, \vhere millions should
have the benefit of it. I am a peaceably inclined citi-
zen, but truly the situation stirs within me feelings
which point to the probability that some of my for-
bears were pirates.

Sorolla is a man who, as we express it in this coun-
try, has made himself. Heaven knows he had good
raw material to work with. He was born in 1863 in

Valencia. It is a strong argument in favor of not
having circumstances too easy in this life that he
began and struggled through many of his earlier
years with very little beside his genius. He was born
neither to wealth nor position, and to complicate mat-
ters, was left an orphan at two years of age. He was
taken in charge by an uncle and aunt, and sent to
school. There he showed a greater gift for making
scrawls of pictures on his books than for profiting by
them in the way they were intended. It seems hard
to believe, but it is a fact that his teacher had the
brains to encourage, or at least tolerate this form of
waywardness, and so did his guardians. At fifteen
years of age they took him out of school and gave
him all the help their moderate circumstances made
possible toward an art career. Sorolla rewarded this
insight by early winning prizes. A scholarship finally
took him to Rome, and later he went to Paris. But

"In spite of all temptations
To belong to other nations,"

he remains most emphatically a Spaniard, and his
talent is devoted to a comprehensive portrait of his
home country and its people.

His overwhelming fecundity indicates at once cer-
tain characteristics of his art. First, in technic, a
great breadth and swiftness; second, an immense

D'53

sympathy with the game of life and its players. His
great passion is sunshine. He is exuberant, keen,
tender, whimsical, brusque, philosophic, but always
strong and impeccably frank. It is unnecessary to
add that he is original.

His pictures are shown in the beautiful patio of
the Hispanic Society. This organization invited
Senor Sorolla to be its guest and to show this large
collection, in the desire to bring about a more inti-
mate understanding of the Spanish people by those of
America. The hosts must feel very content with the
welcome of appreciation which their generosity has
brought forth.

Sorolla has the rare gift possessed by some speak-
ers of getting his idea before you in the simplest and
quickest way. His pictures indicate at once that he
has an idea ; and they do not cover the idea up with a
mass of pictorial verbiage. You know what he is
talking about, you recognize promptly that it is just
what you want to know, and he does not bother you
with those by-products of intellectual gymnastics
which cover up, instead of uncovering, the idea. It is
an art without a grain of affectation. He never lays
on a stroke of paint to make you think he is showing
off. And he does n't make one canvas try to do the
work of half a dozen.

That, of course, does not mean he is understood by
everybody, for we are not by nature very simple in
the artistic sense. The taste for simplicity is a thing
often to be acquired. Some people want a painting
to tell them all the facts, much after the fashion of a
photograph. But then there are those who will sit
down and peruse the dictionary for diversion, instead
of a good yarn. "He 's an impressionist," say these
votaries of truth ; and the whole truth, be it noted.

Sorolla is indeed an impressionist, and a fine one,
too. "These paintings," said a lady who, by the
way, is a well-known artist, "are plans for pictures."
Certain spots and lines here and there on the can-
vases disturbed her, where things had smeared a little,
bent a little out of good drawing, or were left frankly
unfinished. She resented these, just as she would
doubtless resent that a fine orator should make a slip
of grammar, or repeat a word, catch his breath, or
clear his throat. A devotion to details which have no
bearing on the point at issue — the thought being
presented — is a mental cerecloth.

If much is left out of these canvases it is only that
other facts may appear with greater emphasis, that
the imagination of the beholder may gather some
momentum from that of the artist. Whatever is told
is given with such virility, brilliancy, and precision

that even the most unwilling to believe can not say
that it is necessary to write "cow" under any picture
Sorolla intends for "cow." And if he paints one
purple he 's apt to convince you.

Sorolla has the gift of making you feel at home
wherever he leads the way, on the shore among the
boats with fisherman and bathers, in the fields and
cities of Spain, with peasants and grandees, or across
lonely mountain passes. He introduces you to the
most vividly painted and varied personalities in his
portraits. He appears to understand every kind of
individual from king to beggar, and every age from
the nonagenarian to the new-born babe. The collec-
tion here shown contains many examples, all of them
admirable, of this so difficult phase of art.

Those roads and bridges, arid wastes and thickly
wooded hills, the gorges and running waters of Spain,
are brilliant and dramatic with color and light and are
true pictures — every one. That of the young girl
who has just stepped from her ocean bath, with her
wet costume clinging to her, while a youth is throw-
ing a great white sheet about her, is one which seems
to leave no one untouched. It embodies the whole
grace and wholesome light-heartedness of youth, all
bathed in brilliant, rich-colored Spanish sunshine.

If Sorolla leads you in serious, sad, or even tragic

Excelentisitno Senor D. Marcelino Menendez y Pelaj

313

Kxcelentisimo Senor D. Aureliano tie Berut

314

paths it is because he understands all sides of life and
would have his report free from ill proportion. His
"Sad Inheritance," fortunately owned in this country,
shows a priest watching over his charge, a troop of
sickly, maimed, and feeble-minded boys as they take
an ocean dip. You come upon it in this joyous exhi-
bition as you might in life, unawares, a stern re-
minder of the tragic reach which our sympathies must
have if we are to call ourselves human in any ade-
quate sense of the word. We return with fuller
appreciation of the value, of the great cost, of joy
from such a sermon to the overflowing health of the
large picture of Sorolla's daughters on horseback,
dressed in lovely costumes of former days.

Sorolla y Bastida has the instinct of a Shakspere
with his wide grasp of nature and life, and his lyric
and epic presentation of it. His work should incite
a public to active conspiracy with artists, through
intelligent appreciation, to become alive, to make their
art big with the bigness of life itself through their
own bigness of heart and mind.

PAUL K. M. THOMAS.

(The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 28, 1909.)

JOAQUIN SOROLLA Y BASTIDA

IT is not often that a one-man exhibition can fascinate
a community to the extent that the works of the
modern Spanish master, Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida,
have done at the Hispanic Museum, i56th Street and
Broadway, New York, during- the last fortnight.

Up to the present time 53,494 persons have visited
the exhibition. Last Sunday alone the attendance
ivas 10,296 and on Washington's birthday 11,906.
In fact, William M. Chase, instructor at the Penn-
sylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, considered it of
such importance that he took his entire class over to
New York to see it.

The exhibit, composed of 350 pictures, over a hun-
dred of which are small sketches, is the sensation of
the hour in the art world of New York. Until now
little has been known of this man's work among
Americans, except by a few artists living abroad, so
that the present display comes as a complete revela-
tion.

The Metropolitan Museum has purchased two of
the pictures, "Oxen Hauling Boats on Valencia

Kxcelentisimo Senor Marques de \Tiana

315

Beach" and his composition group, "Leonese Peas-
ants," both large canvases, for its permanent collec-
tion.

Most of the paintings are landscapes, with some
few portraits, but it is in his depiction of nature that
Sorolla chiefly excels. These canvases are beautiful
in color, full of sunlight and atmosphere and air.

What Sorolla seeks is not to paint facts or to tell
a story, but to convey to the spectator something of
the glad joy of life that is felt out of doors with
nature— in contact with the sun's warm rays, the cool
play of the breezes, and the broad expanse of sky and
sea. It is primarily these moods of nature that So-
rolla grasps and transmits to his canvases, and in
their ability to hold, to thrill, and fascinate the on-
looker they stand the test of all real art. An artist
friend of Sorolla says that he never makes a correc-
tion in his drawing.

But it is not alone as a colorist that Sorolla excels ;
he is a great draftsman as well. In the large
canvas bought by the Metropolitan, for instance, the
character and action of the oxen straining under their
load, the various attitudes and movements of the
figures, show a perfect mastery of technic.

In the portrait groups is one of the young King of
Spain and one of the Queen, also a full-length, seated

C333]

portrait of the Spanish artist Maclrazo. All are well
rendered, but not so charming as his landscapes.

As to the life of this remarkable man — he was born
in Valencia, Spain, forty-seven years ago. Left an
orphan when but two years old, he was adopted by a
poor though kind-hearted aunt. Early in life Sorolla
took an interest in drawing, and when fifteen was sent
to the academy at Valencia to study art, where he
soon won a prize for color and drawing. A man of
means, seeing talent in the boy, paid for his studies
for several years. Later Sorolla married his patron's
daughter.

As usually happens, his pictures at first received
little recognition, but when his scene of the Spanish
War of Independence was first exhibited at Madrid
it immediately brought him fame. After that he
went to Rome and Paris on a scholarship. His "Fish-
ing-Boats Returning," exhibited first at the Paris
Salon, was bought by the French government for the
Luxembourg. Since then his fame has been uni-
versal.

And yet, Sorolla is a modest, retiring little man,
devoted to his art, his country, and his Spanish
omelet.

The exhibit will remain in New York until March
8th, after which it will go to Buffalo. Why not
Philadelphia?

[334 ]

(The New York Times, February 28, 1909.)

IN the recent issue of "The Bulletin" of the Metro-
politan Museum it is stated with caution : "In matters
of art, we in this country have so long been accus-
tomed to turn to France for our inspirations and ex-
amples that it may well be that we have not been
sufficiently alive to what has been going on in other
countries." It would not be stating the case too
strongly to say that we have been absurdly apathetic
toward what has been going on in other countries.
Our painters have been to school in France with few
exceptions, and in the nursery at home we have been
interested in the outside world only as it brought us
news from the schoolroom, where our big brothers
were having their chance. Fortunately and naturally
with the gradual advance toward maturity of interests
and a wider culture we are ready to change our point
of view. The German exhibition is one sign, for, in
spite of the fact that it owes its existence to the
broad-minded generosity of a private citizen, its en-
thusiastic reception by the public shows that the public
is no longer cribbed, cabined, and confined in taste or
judgment. The Spanish exhibits of the Hispanic
Museum are due to the energy and high ideals of a

[339:]

private citizen, and here also the public has responded
with joyous appreciation. We are promised an exhi-
bition of modern English painting. The ball has
been set rolling, and it is impossible to predict the
proportions to which it will attain. But it will be a
great mistake to permit any reaction against French
art to creep into the general feeling. The modern
French art that is having a representation at Montreal
must come here also.

IN a city not supposed to be characterized by an
interest in art there has been a truly amazing wel-
come accorded to both the German exhibition at the
Metropolitan Museum and the Sorolla exhibition at
the Hispanic Museum. At the German exhibit the
attendance from January 4th, the day on which the
exhibition opened, until February 22d, the day of its
closing, was 168,074. At the Sorolla exhibition the
attendance from February 4th until the morning of
February 25th was 43,358. In the case of the
Sorolla exhibition the first four days were devoted
to a public especially invited. The two record days
of this exhibition were Washington's Birthday, when
11,906 people visited the galleries, and the preceding
Sunday, when 10,296 people were there.1

1 The full record of attendance is given on a subsequent
page.

D40]

(The Evening Post, March 6, 1909.)

THE Sorolla exhibition leaves us to-morrow. Its
memories will remain with us for many a long day.
An article by Christian Brinton on "Sorolla at the
Hispanic Society," which appears in the current num-
ber of the "International Studio" gives a very lucid
view of the Spanish painter's art. It is the fairest
article on the subject that we have read. Mr. Brinton
speaks of "the luminous and stimulating art of So-
rolla," of his being "the strongest personality of his
circle," "that aggressive group of artists who are
to-day reviving with such veracity and force the an-
cient pictorial supremacy of their country," Spain;
he tells us how "there has never been and there can
never be anything speculative or philosophical in the
art of the Iberian Peninsula," that "Spanish painting
does not express symbols, it records facts," that "ful-
filling the broad, traditional requirements of Spanish
painting in general, yet bathed in the vibrant splendor
of the modern palette, the art of Sorolla suggests in
technical surety that of Zorn, Besnard, or Sargent."
"Yet none of these men equals the sturdy Valencian
in his close contact with reality, in the rapidity of his

[345]

impressionistic notation or the magnificent robustness
of his outlook." We would recommend a reading of
Mr. Brinton's article to a certain impressionist painter
of this city who could see nothing but a chromo in
Sorolla's "Beaching the Boat,*' and only snapshots in
the beach pictures.

MR. BRINTON'S article, however, is not all praise.
Sorolla's "powers of ready notation are truly phe-
nomenal," but "it is not so apparent that he is able
deliberately to face a sitter and reconstruct upon
canvas his (the sitter's) inner, as well as his outer
semblance." The majority of the Sorolla portraits,
Mr. Brinton finds "lacking in depth and inevitability."
Sorolla is "not contemplative. He does not in por-
traiture patiently await that confiding self-revelation
which comes with time alone." It is a pity that this
interesting and judicial article did not appear earlier
when unexpectedly large crowds were filling the Mu-
seum on 1 56th Street. It would have assisted these
crowds to a fuller appreciation of the heights to
which Sorolla had reached in that "Jubilant Sym-
phony of Sunlight," to a recognition of his limita-
tions and of the cause of them — he confesses himself
he can feel no sympathy with a sitter in a studio—

C 346:1

when he leaves outdoor life. But better late than
never, the article will serve to keep alive the distinct
revelation the Sorolla exhibition has been to the
American public.

(The New York Times, March 6, 1909.)

SOROLLA

PAINTER of radiant childhood, the sun and the open

sea,

Painter of pitiful babies broken by Destiny,
Painter of flesh and spirit, of youth the dreamer

divine,
Painter of men and women, of faces like thine or

mine,
Master of men's soul-secrets, master of women's

tears—
I bring thee greeting, Sorolla, and honor for thy full

years.

Painter of winds and waters, of winds that laugh as

they blow,
Of waters blue as yon Heaven, of sunshine hotly

aglow,

C35O

Painter of sharp swift motion, of sea-sprite babies

that flee
Out to the flashing breakers, out to their Mother the

Sea,
Master of painted motion, lord of the sea and the

sand—
We bring thee greeting, Sorolla, and hearts that may

understand !

For we of this young strong Nation are keen for the

thing that is true,
We want the art that is Honest and we prod the

Dreamer to do.
We welcome your art, Sorolla, because it 's alive and

aglow
With seedlings and seasons of Nature, \vith the Sea

and its ebb and its flow.

Master of painted canvas, Lover of human kind —
We bring thee greeting, Sorolla, man of the open

mind.

Painter of splendors and squalors, of fishermen,

peasants, and Kings,
Painter of modern Madonnas, of joys that maternity

brings,

Painter of change and of motion, with brush that is

swift like the wind,
Painter of gay, naked boyhood, pure both in body

and mind,
Master of masterly brushwork, with vision unjaded

and keen—
We bring thee greeting, Sorolla, for Art that is vital

and clean.

Painter of radiant childhood, the sun and the open

sea,

Painter of sorrowful children, shattered by Destiny,
Painter of innocent girlhood, of youth the dreamer

divine,
Painter of men and women, of faces like thine and

mine,
Painter of wind and motion, of the wide mysterious

main-
Honor and greeting, Sorolla, to the son of thy

Mother — Spain !

ELIZABETH NEWPORT HEPBURN.

[357]

(The Evening Post, March 8, 1909.)

SOROLLA EXHIBIT ATTENDANCE

SURPRISES STUDIOS

IN A LITTLE MORE THAN ONE MONTH I5O,OOO VISI-
TORS HAVE THRONGED TO THE HISPANIC SOCIETY
MUSEUM AT AUDUBON PARK — THE NUMBER GREW
SO RAPIDLY THAT ARTISTS WONDER.

Is the New York public manifesting a sudden lean-
ing toward things artistic; and, if not, why the sur-
prising figures that were given out to-day at the
Hispanic Society Museum? This is the problem that
is being worked out in the studio belt with eager in-
terest.

The exhibit of the Sorolla canvases — work of the
Spanish painter— will be closed to-night at 10
o'clock. For a bit more than a month the pictures
have been on view, seven days each week, from
10 A.M. until the same hour at night, and at the
opening hour to-day the total of attendance had been
148,899, probably the largest number of visitors ever
recorded at a similar exhibit in this city.

When the collection was first placed on view, on
February 8th, attendance for the day was 589. From
that time the crowds continued to increase, until, yes-

£35*2

IS

terday, 29,461 visitors taxed the capacity of the ex-
hibition room.

SOMETHING about the Sorolla exhibit caught the
popular fancy and there has not been an hour of the
day when the building has not been well filled with
spectators of all classes.

Possibly the manner of conducting the exhibit
has contributed to some extent to its success. There
have been few, if any, restrictions.

The pictures are there, and the visitor may enter
and linger as long as he likes before this or that fa-
vorite, without fear of being requested to make room
for others. Even the umbrella has been treated with
due courtesy, and no officious attendant has been on
hand to separate it from its owner temporarily.

But, of course, the pictures themselves have been
the chief attraction. When they are taken down,
many of them will be shipped to Buffalo, where they
will be placed on exhibition for three weeks. From
Buffalo the collection will travel to Boston for sev-
eral weeks' stay there. It is not likely that the col-
lection will be allowed to leave this country. Many
offers have been made for nearly every canvas in the
group, and most of the paintings will be bought by
local collectors.

Shortly after the lunch hour to-day a small parade
of touring cars, cabs, and other vehicles began ar-
riving, and these, added to the steady stream of visi-
tors who came via the subway, gave the scene outside
the exhibition something of the appearance of a
Monday night at the opera. To-day's attendance, it
was said, would probably be one of the largest of the
month.

(The New York Herald, March 9, 1909.)

160,000 AT HISPANIC MUSEUM

ATTENDANCE GROWS FROM 589 PERSONS AT THE

START, A MONTH AGO, TO 29,461 ON

LAST SUNDAY

THRONGS of persons passed through the Hispanic
Society's museum yesterday to get a last glimpse of
the exhibition of paintings by Mr. Sorolla, a Spanish
painter, which came to a brilliant close. The attend-
ance since the exhibition was opened, on February
4th, has been 160,000 persons.

AT first the attendance was small, but the press and a
general discussion of the merit of the pictures drew
the attention of the public. The first general day,
February 8th, had an attendance of 589 persons.

1:364:

The attendance on February 2ist was 10,296, on
Washington's Birthday, 11,906; on Sunday, Febru-
ary 28th, 19,173, while'on last Saturday it was 25,-
002, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of visitors
were turned away. The highest attendance was
29,461, which was recorded last Sunday.

(The Evening Post, March 9, 1909.)

WHAT inference respecting the popular taste in art
is to be drawn from the extraordinary success of the
exhibition of Senor Sorolla's paintings in this city
during the past month? They have easily been the
art sensation of the year. The works of this one
Spaniard have thrown the show of contemporary
German art into complete eclipse. It is stated that
150,000 visitors have gone to the remote Hispanic
Museum to bathe in Sorolla's sunlight. To conclude
that they were all discriminating lovers of art would
be foolish. A fashion set in such things easily draws
along many thoughtless folk. But we know that
genuine artists have gone again and again with re-
newed delight, and that really intelligent amateurs
of art have leavened the crowds. Admitting the
power of novelty in Sorolla's name and method, we

£367]

yet are bound to see in his marked triumph evidence
of a capacity in the people to appreciate and to be
moved by high art. This ne^ Spanish Conquest of
America simply proves once more that artistic genius
has the world at its feet.

(Las Novedades, New York, March n, 1909.)

EL GRAN TRIUNFO DE SOROLLA

UNA concurrencia inmensa asistio el martes ultimo a
la clausura de la exhibicion de pinturas de Sorolla y
Bastida, en el Museo de la Sociedad Hispanica de
America. El numero de personas que visitaron la
exposicion es el mas grande que jamas haya concu-
rrido en esta ciudad a exhibicion alguna de arte, pues
que desde el 4 de Febrero en que se abrio, han visto
las famosas obras del artista espanol, 160,000 per-
sonas. El primer dia de la exhibicion para el publico,
despues de la exhibicion privada, concurrieron 589 per-
sonas; durante una semana hubo una concurrencia
diaria de 4,000; el 21 de Febrero concurrieron 10,-
296; el 22, dia de fiesta nacional, 11,906; el domingo
28 siguiente, 19,173, y el sabado ultimo, 25,002, no
habiendo sido posible a millares de personas poder
entrar este dia en el Museo, por la cantidad de visi-

tantes. La mas grande cifra fue la alcanzada el do-
mingo ultimo, en que hubo 29,461 visitantes.

No pudo, pues, haber sido mas complete el exito
obtenido por el notable pintor espanol, quien debe,
con razon, sentirse orgulloso de ese triunfo suyo, sin
precedente en este pais. Su nombre se ha hecho ver-
daderamente popular entre los newyorkinos y su repu-
tacion artistica ha quedado solidamente sentada
entre la mas culta sociedad.

Se asegura que la venta de algunos de sus cuadros,
produjo al serior Sorolla de tres cientos a cuatroscien-
tos mil duros y que cuatro de ellos han sido adquiri-
dos para el Museo Metropolitano de Bellas Artes.

No solo desde el punto de vista artistico ha sido
beneficioso para Espaiia el grandiose triunfo de uno
de sus ilustres hijos : el publico de Nueva York ha
tenido ocasion de ver pintadas con la maestria que
Sorolla sabe hacerlo, algunas de las bellas escenas
espaiiolas, que han despertado el interes y el entu-
siasmo a que justamente son acreedoras y hecho nacer
el deseo de ver la hermosa tierra en que se han desa-
rrollado. Los risuenos y pintorescos paisajes de
Valencia, que tan bellos asuntos inspiraron a la ima-
ginacion del gran artista, han revelado al publico
americano la existencia de ttna tierra ideal para pasar
los rigores del verno.

Nos complacemos una vez mas en enviar al ilustre
pintor nuestras mas calurosas y entusiastas felicita-
ciones, movidos por el natural sentimiento de raza
que ha despertado nuestro orgullo tambien ante su
triunfo.

CATALOGUE

I. HIS MAJESTY ALFONSO XIII, KING OF SPAIN
(IN UNIFORM OF HUSSARS)

II. HIS MAJESTY ALFONSO XIII, KING OF SPAIN
(IN UNIFORM OF ARTILLERY)

III. HER MAJESTY VICTORIA EUGENIA CRISTINA,
QUEEN OF SPAIN

IV. HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS THE PRINCE OF
ASTURIAS

V. HER ROYAL HIGHNESS DONA YSABEL DE
BORBON, INFANTA OF SPAIN

VI. HER ROYAL HIGHNESS THE PRINCESS
HENRY OF BATTENBERG

Siete-Picos, Guadarrama

Seven-Peaks, Quadarrama Mts.
The mountain so-called, in the province of Mad-
rid, is about 7160 ft. high.

Covachuelas, Toledo

Covachuelas, Toledo

Covachuelas, "Little Caves," is the most northern

suburb of Toledo.

Las Pedrizas, Pardo

Las Pedrizas, Pardo

Pedriza, "Stony Tract," "Stone Fence." El Pardo,
a little town of 1800 inhabitants, 40 minutes by
tramway north from Madrid, in a royal park 36
miles in circumference.

Senor Gomar

A distinguished landscape-painter

El Torneo, Pardo
El Torneo, Pardo
Torneo, "jousting-place"

Una calle de Toledo

A Toledo street

Vista del Torneo

View from El Torneo

Murallas de Segovia
Walls of Segovia

"Segovia is an unmatched picture of the Middle
Ages. You read its history on the old city-walls
with their eighty-three towers." — A. Gallenga.

9 Convento del Parral, Segovia
Convent of El Parral, Segovia
Parral, "Vine-Arbor." The now suppressed mon-
astery is across the Eresma, to the north of
Segovia.

10 Alrededores de Segovia

Environs of Segovia

1 1 Reflejos del Cabo, Javea

Reflections from the Cape, Javea
Javea, a town of 6700 inhabitants, on the Jalon,
45 miles south of Valencia. The cape is Cabo de
San Antonio.

12 El Clamores, Segovia
The Clamores, Segovia

Segovia is perched on a rocky hill, about 330
ft. high, between two small streams, the Eresma,
north, and the Clamores, south, which join to the
west below the Alcazar.

[382]

13 Rocas del Cabo, Javea

Rocks of the Cape, Javea

14 Alqueria, Alcira
Farm-house, Alcira

Alcira is a town of 20,500 inhabitants, 23 miles
south of Valencia. It has many palms and
orange-trees.

1 5 Maria en Biarritz

Maria at Biarritz

Senorita Doiia Maria Sorolla

16 Sombra del Puente Alcantara, Toledo

Shadow of the Alcantara Bridge, Toledo
This bridge at the northeast angle of the city has
one large and one smaller arch. It is of Moorish
origin (Arab, al kantara=:bridge).

17 Castillo de San Servando, Toledo

On the heights on the left bank of the Tagus are
the ruins of the Castle of San Servando, erected
by Alfonso VI (1072-1109) to protect the convent
of that name and the city, and renewed by
Alfonso VIII (1158-1214).

18 Dr. Decret

An eminent physician
[385]

19 Puente de Alcantara, Toledo

Alcantara Bridge, Toledo

20 La Selva, Gran j a

The Forest, La Gran j a

In 1719 Philip V purchased the granja, "grange,"
of the Hieronymite monks, seven miles southeast
of Segovia and began to construct the chateau
and gardens named La Granja.

21 Rio de las Truchas, Granja

Trout-stream, La Granja

22 Patio de las Danzas, Alcazar, Sevilla
Court of the Dances, Alcazar, Seville
The Alcazar, the palace of the Moorish kings, has
been the residence of the Spanish sovereigns since
the capture of the city by St. Ferdinand in 1248.

23 Adelfas

Rose-bay trees

24 Canada, Asturias

Glen, Asturias

25 Pabellon de Carlos V, Sevilla

Pavilion of Charles V (Charles I of Spain),
Seville

C386]

26 Puente de San Martin, Toledo

St. Martin's Bridge, Toledo

27 Naranjos

Orange-trees

28 Cordeleros

Rope-makers

29 Senor Franzen

The photographer

30 Rocas del Faro, Biarritz

Rocks at the lighthouse, Biarritz

31 Puente de San Martin, Toledo

St. Martin's Bridge, Toledo

32 Pescadora valenciana

Valencian fisherwoman

33 Camino de San Esteban, Asturias

Road of San Esteban, Asturias

34 Estanque del Alcazar, Sevilla

Basin in the Alcazar, Seville
C389]

35 Puerto de Valencia

Harbor of Valencia

36 Amontonando el heno, Asturias

Haymaking, Asturias

37 Casa del Greco, Toledo

House of "El Greco," Toledo

Domingo Theotocopuli, called "El Greco" (1548-

1625)

38 Maria con sombrero negro

Maria with black hat
Senorita Dona Maria Sorolla

39 Torre de entrada en Toledo

Tower of entrance, Toledo

40 Las Covachuelas, Toledo

(See No. 2)

41 Rocas, Javea

Rocks, Javea
(See No. n)

42 Camino de los Alijares, Toledo

Road of the Alijares, "Stony Ground," Toledo

43 Familia segoviana

Segovian family

44 Escaldando uva, Javea

Scalding grapes
(See No. 11)

45 Joaquin

Senor D. Joaquin Sorolla

46 Elena

Helen

Senorita Dona Elena Sorolla

47 El Grutesco, Alcazar, Sevilla

"El Grutesco"

48 Playa de Valencia

Beach of Valencia

49 Velas a secar, Valencia

Sails drying

50 Naranjo

Orange-tree

51 Nino con la barquita

Little boy with toy boat

52 Viejo pescador valenciano

Old Valencian fisherman

53 Barcas de pesca

Fishing-boats

D93]

54 Puerto de Valencia

Harbor of Valencia

55 El beso

The kiss

56 Nino sobre una roca, Javea

Little boy on a rock

57 Bao de la Reina, Valsain

The Queen's Beam, Valsain

Valsain, an old and neglected hunting-chateau,
two miles from La Gran j a, built by Philip II and
burned in the reign of Charles II.

58 Escalera del Palacio, Granja

Staircase of the Palace, La Granja

59 Elena en el Pardo

Helen at El Pardo

60 Fuente de los Caballos, Granja

Fountain of the Horses, La Granja
The fountains of La Granja are superior to those
of Versailles. They were mainly made in 1727 by
Isabella Farnese as a surprise for her husband
Philip V, on his return after a long absence. He
said : "It has cost me three millions and has
amused me three minutes." The water is supplied
• by an artificial lake, El Mar, 4100 ft. above the
sea.

[394]

61 Otofio, Granja

Autumn, La Granja

62 Maria pintando, Pardo

Maria painting, Pardo

63 Fuente de la Selva, Granja

Fountain of the Forest, La Granja

64 Fuente de Neptuno, Granja

Fountain of Neptune, La Granja

65 Huerto de naranjos, Valencia

Orange-grove, Valencia

66 Francisqueta, Valencia

Fanny, Valencia

67 Esperando la pesca, Valencia

Waiting for the fish, Valencia

68 Recogiendo la vela, Valencia

Taking in the sail, Valencia

69 Regreso de la pesca, Valencia

Return from fishing, Valencia

[397 1

70 Pescadores de quisquillas, Valencia

Crayfishers, Valencia

71 Nadador, Javea

Swimmer, Javea

72 Elena entre rosas

Helen among roses

73 Idilio

Idyl

74 Serior D. Vicente Blasco Ibanez

The eminent novelist

75 Arbol amarillo, Granja

Yellow tree, La Granja

76 El ciego de Toledo

Blind man of Toledo

77 Pescadora con su hijo, Valencia

Fisherwoman with her son, Valencia

78 El bafio, Granja

The bath, La Granja
D98]

79 Cosiendo la vela, Valencia

Sewing the sail, Valencia

80 Buscando cangrejos, Javea

Looking for crabs, Javea

81 Maria, Granja

Maria, La Granja

82 Joaquin y su perro

Joaquin and his dog

83 Sobre la arena

Upon the sand

84 Pescadoras valencianas

Valencian fisherwomen

85 Senora de Sorolla (bianco)

Seiiora de Sorolla in white

86 A la orilla del mar, Valencia

At the sea-shore. Valencia

87 Valenciana

Valencian woman

En los jardines de la Granja

In the Gardens of La Granja

The Gardens of La Granja, laid out by the

French landscape-gardener, Boutelet, cover 350

89 Viejo castellano

Old Castilian

90 Excelentisimo

Seiior Marques D. Estanislao de Urquijo

Banker and statesman

91 Hija de pescador, Valencia

Fisherman's daughter, Valencia

92 Elena y sus munecas

Helen and her dolls

93 Mis hijos

My children

94 Nadadores

Swimmers

95 Baja mar (Elena en Biarritz)

Low tide (Helen at Biarritz)

96 Componiendo redes

Mending nets

[402]

336

97 El bano, Javea

The bath, Javea

98 El baiio, Javea

99 Encajonando pasa

Boxing raisins

100 Puente de la Selva, Granja

Forest Bridge, La Granja

101 Vista del Palacio, Granja

View of the Palace, La Granja

1 02 Vuelta de la pesca, Valencia

Return from fishing, Valencia

103 Al bano, Valencia

At the bath, Valencia

104 Nina con lazo azul, Valencia

Little girl with blue ribbon, Valencia

[05 Maria en el puerto de Javea

Maria, at the harbor of Javea
[405]

106 Instantanea, Biarritz

Instantaneous, Biarritz

107 Nino entre espumas, Javea

Boy among breakers, Javea

1 08 Jardin del Alcazar, Sevilla

Garden of the Alcazar, Seville

109 Camino de adelfas, Valencia

Rose-bay road, Valencia

1 10 Maria y su abuela

Maria and her grandmother

in Malvarrosa, Valencia

Malvarrosa Beach, Valencia

112 Huerta de Valencia

The Huerta or "Garden" of Valencia

113 Jardin del Alcazar, Sevilla

Garden of the Alcazar, Seville

114 Jardin del Alcazar, Sevilla
C406]

H5 La Giralda, Sevilla

This tower, originally the minaret of the principal
mosque, was erected 1184-96 by the architect
Jabir. It is 45 ft. sq., has walls 8 ft. thick and
was at first 230 ft. high. In 1568 the cathedral
chapter commissioned Hernan Ruiz to build the
upper section. The Giraldillo or vane is 305 ft.
above the ground.

116 Palacio de Carlos V, Sevilla

Palace of Charles V, Seville

117 Puerto de Valencia

Harbor of Valencia

n<^ Marques de la Vega- Ynclan

119 Puerto de Valencia
Harbor of Valencia

120 Al agua, Valencia

At the water

121 Casa de la Huerta, Valencia

House in the "Huerta," Valencia

122 Jardin de la playa, Valencia
Beach garden, Valencia

[409;]

123 Huerta de Valencia

"Huerta" of Valencia

124 Jardin del Alcazar, Sevilla

Garden of the Alcazar, Seville

125 Asturias

Asturias

126 San Sebastian

San Sebastian

126A Estudio de oleaje

Study of surf

127 Puerto viejo. Biarritz

Old harbor, Biarritz

128 Playa de Biarritz

Beach of Biarritz

129 Playa de Biarritz

130 Playa de Biarritz

131 Playa de Biarritz

132 Playa de Biarritz

133 Playa de Biarritz

134 Playa de Biarritz

135 Playa de Biarritz

136 Playa de Biarritz

137 Playa de Biarritz

138 Playa de Biarritz

139 Playa de Biarritz

140 Playa de Biarritz

141 Playa de Biarritz

142 Playa de Biarritz

143 Playa de Biarritz

144 La Concha, San Sebastian

San Sebastian, the summer residence of the royal
family, is at the south base of the Monte Orgull,
a rocky island now connected with the main land,

[4.3:

and on alluvial ground between the mouth of the
Urumea on the east and the bay of La Concha,
"The Shell," on the west.

145 Playa de Biarritz

146 Playa de Biarritz

147 Playa de Biarritz

148 Playa de Biarritz

149 Playa de Biarritz

150 Playa de Biarritz

151 Playa de Biarritz

152 Playa de Biarritz

153 Playa de Biarritz

154 Playa de Biarritz

155 Playa de Valencia

C4I4-3

• =

156 Playa de Valencia

157 Playa de Valencia

158 Puerto de San Sebastian

159 Puerto de San Sebastian

1 60 Playa de Valencia

161 Pasajes

The beautiful and almost land-locked Bay of
Pasajes, which resembles an Alpine lake. The
Basque whaling-port from the i6th to the i8th
century. From it Lafayette sailed for America
in 1776.

162 Puerto de San Sebastian

163 La Concha, San Sebastian

164 La Concha, San Sebastian

165 Puerto de Pasajes

£4173

1 66 Playa de Valencia

167 Playa de Valencia

1 68 Playa de Valencia

169 Playa de Valencia

170 Playa de Valencia

171 Playa de Valencia

172 Playa de Valencia

173 Playa de Valencia

174 Playa de Valencia

175 Playa de Valencia

176 Playa de Valencia

177 Playa de Valencia

178 Cabo de San Antonio, Javea

Cape San Antonio, Javea

179 Galicia

1 80 Cosiendo la vela

Sewing the sail

181 Adormideras

Poppies

182 Playa de Valencia

183 Malvarrosa

Malvarrosa Beach, Valencia

184 Puerto de San Sebastian

185 Playa de Valencia

1 86 Locutorio

"Locutory," in convents a place for the reception
of visitors.

187 Playa de Valencia

[420

1 88 Playa de Valencia

189 Cabo de San Antonio, Javea

Cape San Antonio, Javea

190 Not exhibited

191 Adelfas

Rose-bays

192 Playa de Valencia

193 La Concha, San Sebastian

194 Playa de Valencia

195 Playa de Valencia

196 Playa de Valencia
I96A Playa de Valencia

197 Biarritz

198 Biarritz

341

199 Segovia

200 Asturias

201 Versalles

Versailles

202 Playa de Valencia

203 Playa de Valencia

204 Playa de Valencia

205 Playa de Valencia

206 Patio del Cabafial
Court of the Cabafial

In the season (mid-June to October) tramways
run from Valencia to the north through El
Cabafial, "Huts," to the bathing-establishment,
Las Arenas.

207 En el rio

In the river

208 Puerto de Valencia

2OO, Playa de Valencia

210 Puerto de Valencia

211 Playa de Valencia

212 Playa de Valencia

213 Playa de Valencia

214 Malvas reales

Roval mallows

215 Los geranios

Geraniums

216 Altar de San Vicente, Valencia

Altar of St. Vincent Ferrer in the house in which
he was born, at Valencia, Jan. 23, 1355 or 1357
He died in 1419.

217 Playa de Valencia

218 Puerto de Aviles

219 Playa de Valencia

220 Playa de Valencia

221 Plava de Valencia

222 Mercado de Leon

Market of Leon

223 Playa de Valencia

224 Playa de Valencia

225 Playa de Valencia

226 Playa de Valencia

227 Playa de Valencia

228 Huerta de Valencia

"Huerta" of Valencia

229 Playa de Valencia

230 Playa de Valencia

C429]

231 Playa de Valencia

232 Playa de Valencia

233 Playa de Valencia

234 Playa de Valencia

235 Asturias

236 Playa de Valencia

237 Mujeres jugando

Women playing

238 Playa de Valencia

239 Playa de Valencia

240 Playa de Valencia

241 Playa de Valencia

24IA Original sketch for No. 350
C430]

Senor 1). Manuel B. Cossio

344

242 Mercado de Leon

243 Playa de Valencia

244 Playa de Valencia

245 Playa de Valencia

246 Playa de Valencia

247 Asturias

248 Leon

249 Asturias

250 Javea

251 Asturias

252 Leon

253 Asturias

[433]

254 Asturias

255 Playa de Valencia

256 Playa de Valencia

257 Asturias

258 Leon

259 Playa de Valencia

260 Playa de Valencia

261 Playa de Valencia

262 Leon

263 Playa de Valencia

264 Asturias
26; Galicia

[4341]

266 Malvarrosa

Malvarrosa Beach, Valencia

267 Javea

268 Biarritz

269 Puerto de Javea

270 La Concha, San Sebastian

271 San Sebastian

272 San Sebastian

273 Playa de Valencia

274 Playa de Valencia

275 Playa de Valencia

276 Playa de Valencia

277 Playa de Valencia

[437]

278 Lavanderas

Washerwomen

279 San Sebastian

280 Playa de Valencia

281 San Sebastian

282 San Sebastian

283 Playa de Valencia

284 Playa de Valencia

285 El tio Pancha

Uncle Pancha

286 Serior Garcia

The father-in-law of Senor Sorolla

287 Nino desnudo, Granja

Boy nude. La Granja

288 Seriora de Sorolla (negro)

Senora de Sorolla in black
[438;]

289 Excelentisimo

Senor Duque de Alba

Grande de Espafia

290 Madre (Senora de Sorolla)

Mother (Senora de Sorolla)

291 Corriendo por la playa

Running along the beach

292 Despues del baiio

After the bath

293 Paseo del Faro, Biarritz

Lighthouse Walk, Biarritz

294 Nino en la playa

Little boy on the beach

295 Cabo de San Antonio, Javea

Cape San Antonio, Javea

296 Excelentisimo

Senor Conde de Villagonzalo

The Count de Villagonzalo

297 Nino en el mar
Boy in the sea

[441]

298 Xinos en la playa

Children on the beach

299 Barcas valencianas

Valencian boats

300 El hermano pequeno

The little brother

301 Niiios en el mar

Children in the sea

302 Naranjal, Alcira

Orange-grove, Alcira

303 Al ag-ua

At the water

304 Xiiio en la playa

Little bov on the beach

305 Calle cle naranjos

Street of orange-trees

306 Jugando en el agua

Playing in the water

[442]

Excelentisimo Senc

. Alejandro Piclal y .Moti

347

307 Playa de Valencia (Luz de la mafiana)

Beach of Valencia by morning light

308 Salida del bafio

Coming out of the bath

309 El nieto

The grandson

310 Alegria del agua

Water joy

311 Sobre la arena

On the sand

312 D. Francisco Acebal

Man of letters

313 Excelentisimo

Sefior D. Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo

The most eminent living scholar of Spain. Born
at Santander, Nov. 3, 1856, at the age of 22 he be-
came a professor in the University of Madrid,
and when 25 was admitted to the Spanish
Academy. After more than twenty years' service
he resigned his professorship to become Director
of the National Library.

314 Excelentisimo

Sefior D. Aureliano de Beruete

An eminent historian and critic of art, especially
distinguished for his work on Velazquez.

[4453

315 Excelentisimo

Seiior Marques cle Viana

Grande cle Espana

316 Playa de Valencia

317 Serior Granzon

318 Toros que se preparan para sacar las

barcas de pesca, Valencia

Oxen ready to beach fishing-boats, Valencia
Called in England "Beaching the Boat"'

319 Niiios en el mar

Children in the sea

320 Mar (Efecto de la manana)

Sea (Morning effect)

321 Barca pescadora

Fishing-boat

322 Velas en el mar

Sails at sea

323 Vuelta de la pesca

Return from fishing

324 Barcas en la arena

Boats on the sand

[446;]

Excelentisima Senora de Sorolla de mantilla espanol

34*

325 Estudio de barcas

Study of boats

326 Barcas pescadoras

Fishing-boats

327 Barcas

Boats

328 Nifios en la orilla

Children on the beach

329 Playa de Valencia

330 Playa de Valencia

33 1 Playa de Valencia

332 Playa de Valencia

333 Redes a secar

Nets drying

334 Empujando la barca

Shoving off the boat

[449]

335 Playa de Valencia

336 Adelfas

Rose-bays

337 Playa de Valencia

338 Playa de Valencia

339 Playa de Valencia

340 Leoneses

Leonese peasants

341 Al bafio

At the bath

342 Idilio en el mar

Sea idyl

343 Not exhibited

344 Senor D. Manuel B. Cossio

Director of the Institute Pedagogico, Madrid, and

author of "El Greco"

(Acquired by the Hispanic Society of America)

[450;]

349

345 Los pimientos

The peppers

(Acquired by the Hispanic Society of America)

346 Excelentisimo

Sefior D. Raimundo de Madrazo

Descendant and kinsman of painters, and himself
an eminent portrait-painter

347 Excelentisimo

Sefior D. Alejandro Pidal y Mon
Statesman and man of letters

348 Excelentisima

Senora de Sorolla de mantilla espafiola

Senora de Sorolla in Spanish mantilla

349 Mis hijas, Elena y Maria a caballo con los
trajes valencianos de 1808

My daughters, Helen and Maria on horseback in
Valencian costumes of 1808, the year of the out-
break of the War for Independence against
Napoleon

350 Triste Herencia

Sad Inheritance

(See p. 20 of Introduction)

ATTENDANCE AT THE EXHIBITION BV

THE HISPANIC SOCIETY OF AMERICA

OF THE PAINTINGS OF

JOAQUfN SOROLLA

PRIVATE VIEW

Thursday, February 4 88

Friday, February 5 194

Saturday, February 6 456

Sunday, February 7 905

PUBLIC EXHIBITION, FIRST WEEK

Monday, February 8 589

Tuesday, February 9 531

Wednesday, February 10 453

Thursday, February 1 1 658

Friday, February 12 2»445

Saturday, February 13 1,611

Sunday, February 14 4,047

SECOND WEEK

Monday, February 15 775

Tuesday, February 16 514

Wednesday, February 17 1»4?6

Thursday, February 18 1,517

Friday, February 19 1,122

Saturday, February 20 2,274

Sunday, February 21 10,296

THIRD WEEK

Monday, February 22 11,906

Tuesday, February 23 680

Wednesday, February 24 821

Thursday, February 25 i,39°

Friday, February 26 2,586

Saturday, February 27 6,160

Sunday, February 28 I9,'73

FOURTH WEEK

Monday, March i. ... 3,176

Tuesday. March 2 2,356

Wednesday, March 3 4,794

Thursday, March 4 2,536

Friday, March 5 8,904

Saturday, March 6 25,002

Sunday, March 7 29,461

Monday, March 8

WHOLE NVMBER OF VISITORS,

FEBRUARY 4 -MARCH 8, INCLUSIVE

[457]

1,643

42,716

76,229
•io,935

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