Walk on the beach
Walk on the beach ( Spanish Paseo a la orillas del mar or Paseo a orillas del mar ), is a picture painted in oil on canvas by the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla from 1909. It is 205 cm high and 200 cm wide. The painter's wife and eldest daughter are shown taking a walk on the beach in Valencia . The painting belongs to the collection of the Museo Sorolla in Madrid .
Image description
On more than four square meters, Joaquín Sorolla shows two women strolling by the sea in the painting Strandspaziergang . The 205 × 200 cm canvas has an almost square format and is unusually monumental for a beach view. Sorolla's wife Clotilde and his eldest daughter Maria were the models for the two life-size women. Sorolla painted the scenery on Playa de El Cabanyal in his native city of Valencia. Both women can be seen from the side with their bodies slightly leaning forward so that they seem to be moving towards the right edge of the picture. While the head of the wife depicted in the painting on the left is directed straight ahead to the right edge of the picture, the daughter Maria has turned her head slightly to the right shoulder and looks in the direction of the viewer. Mother and daughter both wear long white summer dresses. The elegant presentation, which also includes a straw hat and a parasol for the mother, is typical of fashion around 1910. 19-year-old Maria wears a simple floor-length dress that emphasizes her slim silhouette. The dress is finished with a stand-up collar at the neck. In contrast to the rest of the dress, the tight-fitting sleeves are made of a more transparent white fabric that lets the skin shine through. A veil is made of a similar material and is attached to a large ring below the chest. Due to the sea wind, the veil sways in the air behind the daughter like an arabesque below the back. A brown leather shoe peeks out from under the dress, on the side of which light reflections emphasize the smooth surface. In her right hand Maria is holding a yellow straw hat with a wide brim, which is decorated with purple flowers and a turquoise bow. Maria has pinned her brown hair up in a bun so that her face comes into its own.
Clotilde Sorolla, walking behind her daughter, is also wearing a white dress. Her hips are emphasized by a white belt. As a result, both the breast and the buttocks have clearer contours than on the daughter. Her dress is made with half-length sleeves that can be covered with a matching jacket if necessary. Clotilde placed this jacket, also made of white fabric, over her left forearm, which is bent in front of her stomach. In her left hand she holds a white sunshade, which is inclined towards the earth on the left edge of the picture. Two elegant white ladies' shoes with small heels peek out from under Clotilde's dress. Clotilde wears a straw hat on her head, which is also decorated with purple flowers. In addition, a greenish-transparent veil is draped over the entire hat, which falls in front of the face and envelops it and is moved almost horizontally in the air towards the back by the wind. Clotilde has bent her right arm upwards and is reaching for the veil that is on her shoulder. This creates the impression that she has to readjust the veil moved by the wind or even hold onto it. Little can be seen of the wife's head. Large parts of the face shown in profile are in the shade and brighter sunlight falls only on the chin area. The wide hat also covers the hair almost completely. Only behind the ear adorned with a pearl is a hint of the dark hair. While the young face of the daughter Maria looks directly into the sunlight, the face of the 25-year-old mother is hidden by the veil and the shadow of the hat. The clothes and accessories identify the two women as members of the upper class of society who spend their free time in the summer in mild temperatures and light winds.
Mother and daughter stand a few meters from the sea on an ocher-colored sand that defines the foreground at the bottom of the picture. Unlike the people shown, the painter has reproduced the sand surface in short, moving lines. Behind the two women is the smooth transition from the beach to the sea. The viewer's angle of view is slightly raised so that no horizon line can be seen. Instead, the beach and the sea form a curtain-like background and the white rippling foothills of a wave at the top of the picture replace the horizon. The sea changes in different shades of blue, which Sorolla applied in long brushstrokes. In front of Clotilde's chest, the sea has a light blue color, behind her back there are darker shades of blue. The area to the right of the daughter is indistinct, where the turquoise surface of the water is difficult to distinguish from the bank. The dominant color of the picture is the white of the clothes and the parasol. Sorolla mixed this white with numerous other colors, following the example of the French Impressionists. The white also contains blue, yellow, lavender or orange-colored parts in order to work out the effects of light and shadow. Due to the bright white tones, the figures stand out clearly from the rest of the picture. The light is characteristic of the early evening of a summer day on the Mediterranean. The sun, which is already low, shines from the direction of the viewer on the two women who can be seen to the side, whose long shadows are visible behind them on the beach. The reproduction of these light effects under the southern sun are typical of Luminismo valenciano , a special form of Neo- Impressionism that emerged from Impressionism in Spain and whose main exponent was Joaquín Sorolla.
Background to the creation of the painting
The year 1909 was extremely successful for Sorolla. Although he had already gained much recognition for his paintings and received awards not only in Spain, but also in France and Germany, the year 1909 was a high point in his career. At the invitation of the American art collector Archer M. Huntington , he traveled with him his wife and their two older children Maria and Joaquín moved to New York City earlier this year . Huntington had opened the Hispanic Society of America here the year before and Sorolla was to show the first exhibition of his works in the United States in their rooms. It was Sorolla's first trip across the Atlantic and the success that followed was not foreseeable. The exhibition opened on February 4, 1909 and initially only a few visitors came. That changed when very positive reports began to appear in the newspapers. When the exhibition closed on March 8, a total of 169,000 visitors had seen Sorolla's works. Encouraged by the enormous popularity, the exhibition was shown in a slightly different form in Buffalo and Boston . During his stay in the United States, Sorolla received 20 portrait commissions, including that of the recently-elected American President William Howard Taft , whom he visited at the White House in Washington, DC . When Sorolla left the United States in May 1909, he had sold a total of 195 paintings - including two works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art - and raised the enormous sum of US $ 181,760.
Back in Europe, Sorolla first stayed in Paris and showed the painting Evening Sun from 1903, a picture with fishermen from Valencia as a motif , in the art exhibition of the Société des Artistes Français . Via Madrid he traveled on to Valencia, where he saw his daughter Elena and the rest of the family again. He participated in the local art exhibition Exposicion Regional and received a second prize for the work exhibited there. Inspired by the success of his trip to America and the good reviews he received at the exhibitions in Paris and Valencia, an extremely productive summer began for Sorolla. He planned to travel to the United States again on an exhibition tour in 1911 and needed new paintings for this. He stayed in Valencia until the end of September and created “some of his best and most spectacular beach scenes” during these summer months, as his biographer and great-granddaughter Blanca Pons-Sorolla notes. For the author José Luis Alcaide , the painting Beach Walk , created this summer, represents a high point in Sorolla's career.
Sorolla's beach pictures
Valencia-born Joaquín Sorolla had been familiar with life by the sea since his youth. In his early work there is the traditional port view of Marina, Barcos en el puerto , with which he made his debut in 1881 at the Expsoición National art exhibition in Madrid. In the 1890s he repeatedly took up the subject of the fishermen from Valencia. In some very large-format pictures, he showed fishermen bringing their catch ashore or pulling their boat onto the beach with oxen. In addition, he portrayed boat builders, fish traps and fish sellers. The focus of his pictures was not on the glamorous life with its leisure activities, but on people working by the sea. He received very positive reviews for this work and was awarded prizes. In addition, these works brought international success. The French state bought the painting La vuelta de la presca from 1895 and the Berlin National Gallery acquired Pescadores valencianos from 1895.
Around 1900 Sorolla began to paint children bathing in water. In the painting La hora del baño from 1904, Sorolla combined the themes of fishermen and bathing children and shows naked children swimming between a fishing boat and oxen standing in the water. In the foreground, one of the children comes out of the sea and is expected by a young woman who stretches out a white cloth to dry off the wet child. Sorolla anticipates parts of the painting Strandspaziergang in this picture . The white fabric plays a central role: the blowing of the fabric in the wind is already the subject of the picture, the bank area between the water and the beach has no clear contours and the whole picture is bathed in the sunlight of an early evening.
That same summer, Sorolla portrayed his wife Clotilde at the Valencia stand. In Clotilde en la playa , the wife is sitting on a stool not far from the sea in a white dress. Here the parasol that comes back later in a walk on the beach is already an important prop. The open umbrella casts shadows on her face, which in the later picture is hidden by a veil. In this picture, too, the painter has taken a slightly elevated position so that no horizon line can be seen in the background. Instead, the beach in the foreground merges directly into the waves of the sea without the sky being visible.
In 1906 Sorolla visited Biarritz in northern Spain with his family . In the group portrait Paseo de Faro he shows several women strolling along the cliffs above the beach. Here the painter shows the beach and a rock formation bathed in water as a background motif. In the foreground of the frieze-like picture, the women are loosely arranged side by side. Here, too, the white clothing dominates the scene, only the young girl in the center of the picture is granted a striking red jacket as an exclamation point. Large hats and umbrellas are important props on this walk too.
In 1909 he returned to the beach in Valencia and again found motifs showing people by the sea. In the portrait of Elena en la playa , Sorolla portrayed his youngest daughter in a white dress with the beach as a background motif. In this portrait, as in the walk on the beach , which was taken around the same time, Sorolla painted the meeting of water and land, the waves on the sea, the wind in a moving dress and hat, and the light of a summer day on the Mediterranean.
Provenance
The painting was in his possession until the painter's death. In his will, he bequeathed the picture to his son Joaquín Sorolla García , who from 1931 was the first director of the Museo Sorolla , which was set up in his parents' former home . Sorolla's wife Clotilde had bequeathed the house and its inventory to the Spanish state, with the condition that a museum dedicated to Joaquín Sorolla be set up. His mother's generous example was also followed by his son Joaquín Sorolla García, who bequeathed the painting Strandspaziergang with other works by his father to the Spanish state after his death in 1948. Since then it has been part of the collection of the Museo Sorolla in Madrid.
literature
- José Luis Díez, Javier Barón: Joaquín Sorolla, 1863-1923 , Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid 2009, ISBN 978-84-8480-183-2 .
- Blanca Pons-Sorolla: Joaquín Sorolla , Ediciones Polígrafa, Barcelona 2009, ISBN 978-84-343-1225-8 .
- Blanca Pons-Sorolla: Sorolla, the masterpieces . Frölich & Kaufmann, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-945330-03-6 .
- Begoña Torres González: Sorolla , Libsa, Madrid 2009, ISBN 978-84-662-1040-9 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ German title Strandspaziergang nach Blanca Pons-Sorolla: Sorolla, the masterpieces , p. 124.
- ↑ Paseo a la orillas del mar use José Luis Díez and Javier Barón in Joaquín Sorolla, 1863-1923 , 2009, p. 401 and Blanca Pons-Sorolla in Joaquín Sorolla , p. 207. Deviating there is Paseo a orillas del mar near Begoña Torres González in Sorolla , 2009, p. 326 and the Museo Sorolla noted this title on its homepage.
- ↑ Begoña Torres González: Sorolla , 2009, p. 326
- ↑ José Luis Díez, Javier Barón: Joaquín Sorolla, 1863-1923 , 2009, p. 402.
- ↑ José Luis Díez, Javier Barón: Joaquín Sorolla, 1863-1923 , 2009, p. 402.
- ↑ José Luis Díez, Javier Barón: Joaquín Sorolla, 1863-1923 , 2009, p. 402.
- ↑ Begoña Torres González: Sorolla , 2009, p. 326
- ↑ José Luis Díez, Javier Barón: Joaquín Sorolla, 1863-1923 , 2009, p. 402.
- ↑ Begoña Torres González: Sorolla , 2009, p. 326
- ↑ Blanca Pons-Sorolla: Joaquín Sorolla , 2009, p. 200.
- ↑ Blanca Pons-Sorolla: Joaquín Sorolla , 2009, p. 200.
- ↑ Blanca Pons-Sorolla: Joaquín Sorolla , 2009, p. 202.
- ↑ José Luis Díez, Javier Barón: Joaquín Sorolla, 1863-1923 , 2009, p. 495.
- ↑ Blanca Pons-Sorolla: Joaquín Sorolla , 2009, p. 204.
- ↑ Blanca Pons-Sorolla: Joaquín Sorolla , 2009, p. 204.
- ↑ José Luis Díez, Javier Barón: Joaquín Sorolla, 1863-1923 , 2009, p. 495.
- ↑ Blanca Pons-Sorolla: "Some of his best and most spectacular beach scenes come from this summer" in Joaquín Sorolla , 2009, p. 204.
- ↑ José Luis Alcaide: "Por supuesto que pintará más cuadros de playa, pero sin duda este conjunto de lienzos representa un jalon esencial en su carrera." In José Luis Díez, Javier Barón: Joaquín Sorolla, 1863-1923 , 2009, p. 402
- ^ Blanca Pons-Sorolla: Joaquín Sorolla , 2009, p48.
- ↑ One of the earliest works with the theme of bathing boys is El baño from 1899, a study for the large-format painting ¡Triste herencia! from 1901. Compare Blanca Pons-Sorolla: Joaquín Sorolla , 2009, pp. 108–111.
- ↑ José Luis Díez, Javier Barón: Joaquín Sorolla, 1863-1923 , 1900, p. 326.