Joaquín Sorolla (1863 to 1923) was a Spanish painter from Valencia, remembered for sunlit beach scenes of children, oxen and women in white dresses, painted outdoors and at speed. In 1909 more than 150,000 people crowded into his New York exhibition, and in 1911 he signed on for fourteen enormous canvases of Spain.
They call him the painter of light. His first great success, though, was a painting of children who could not walk, and he came to hate it.
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The picture was Sad Inheritance, painted in 1899. It shows disabled children bathing naked in the sea at Malvarrosa beach in Valencia, watched over by a monk in a dark robe, a brother of the order of Saint John of God. The children are now thought to have been victims of a polio epidemic.
The painting won the Grand Prix at the Paris Exposition of 1900, and the prize put Sorolla in front of the whole art world.
He took no pleasure in it. Sorolla said he had suffered terribly while painting it, and he decided never to paint a subject like that again. He kept his word. For the next twenty years the sea in his pictures is full of children too, but they are running, splashing and shouting in full sun.
What You'll Discover
Whose letters he kept writing.
Why a prize ended his sad subjects.
Why New York could not get enough.
Whether he was really an Impressionist.
Which Spain he rushed to paint.