Retracing painter’s journey into the mystique of light

A bright day in a village home. Men and women, old and young, are mending a sail spread out on a leafy courtyard. The cerulean sea shimmers far beyond the door. A domestic scene from working class life? But the hero is the sail, its swirling folds splattered in sunlight and shadows. 

This coruscating canvas at “Master of Light”, an exhibition of Joaquin Sorolla’s (1863-1923) oeuvre (National Museum, London), was enough to explain just why the Spanish artist declared, “I hate darkness… We painters, however, can never reproduce sunlight as it really is. I can only approach the truth of it.” In canvas after canvas, Sorolla’s brush strove to capture this ever-elusive mystique of light.

Look! A blaze of surreal abstraction exploding on the wall! Go up close and it turns into green grass, blue sky and supine sunbathers. A billowing field of snow dissolves into a bed of foamy white. Two faces emerge — a mother glancing at her newborn with caressing wonder.

Trained in the art academy in hometown Valencia, gaining experience in Rome and Paris, Sorolla began with social realism to present historical events, landscapes and portraits. Soon he began to blend the Impressionist thirst for light with the black grandeur of the Spanish maestro Velasquez. However, though the narrative-historical brought fame and financial success on both sides of the Atlantic, they also edged him out of reckoning in the age of Picasso. Today’s revaluation brings some new insights.   

Born poor, orphaned at age two, no wonder Sorolla reveals himself as a family man. His children are favourite models. Adored wife Clotilde never seems to age through the years! A semi-formal family study shows mother and three children in the dark living room. A square of light on the wall behind them quivers into a surprise — the father painting in the next room. Elsewhere Sorolla can be less classical, more implicative. His well-wrapped daughter against a brick red wall — vigorously angled and brush-stroked to suggest illness, is later found in a garden chair — her recovery lit up through a translucent umbrella.  

Living in his own beach house on the Valencian coast by the Mediteranean sea, how could the artist not evolve techniques to celebrate the play of light and shade, wave and foam, colour and contrast?

And on the beach, this master of light becomes a master of the wind. You hear the soughing winds as his women walk on the sand, their long veils flapping and floating behind them. Seen through the slats of the window, waves sound a sensuous backscore as a woman is about to change her wet garments. The sun sings through billowing sails. Children laugh and squeal as they run naked on the beach, their bodies incandescent, or greening under water. Trailing rainbow beams and shifting shadows, they wriggle on the sand, crawl through waves, leap over each other, pull boats, tug sails… This is a tactile experience – pulsating, moist, grainy.

However, “Sad Inheritance” shows a chilly side.  Hobbling on crutches, children stumble into the sea – a rare outdoor treat for bleak lives. Along with their monk-guide in ominous black, the very title implies that they are paying for the “sins” of their syphilitic parents. We learn that this painting became the rage at the Paris World Exhibition (1900).

Sorolla uses biblical imagery with a more obviously realist brush in two early award-winners, to raise questions about social justice.  “Another Margarita!” showcases a young, emaciated woman who had murdered her infant — eyes looking up from bent face, slender hands twisting within the folds of her worn dress. Two guards loom over her. This hugely acclaimed painting shows how and why Sorolla was inspired by the emerging techniques of photography, and indeed he claimed to have witnessed the actual scene on the train.  The second, and equally lauded “And they say fish is expensive!”  has two fishermen on a rocking boat, bent over their comrade, who has been caught in a hook. The Christ metaphor is unsubtle, the title sentimental. But the anger is genuine, not untouched by irony.

Critical and financial triumphs did not rule out all scoffing and dismissal. However, for his last, most ambitious and exhausting project, Sorolla developed an entirely new style to create 14 gigantic murals, commissioned by a patron in the US for the Hispanic Society of America. Travelling through Navarre, Seville, Andalusia, Castile , he created open air vignettes of the people, capturing their magnificent lifestyles and costumes, their piercing eyes and fierce pride. A great legacy.

Finally, I return to the first painting in the show. An empty seat in Sorolla’s multi-hued, sun-drenched Madrid garden, where he had the stroke which eventually ended his journey. The Master of Light had been painting then, striving to dispel “hated darkness”, seeking the radiance of “truth”.

The author is a playwright, theatre director, musician and journalist