Strolling Along the Seashore (Paseo a orillas del mar) is a painting by JoaquĆn Sorolla from the summer of 1909. It shows his wife Clotilde and his eldest daughter MarĆa, then 19, walking on a beach in Valencia. It hangs today in the Museo Sorolla in Madrid, in the house where he lived.
The scene is plain on purpose. Two women walk along the edge of the water, the sea has no horizon, and a curl of white foam runs across the top of the canvas where it should be. Nothing happens. The wind pushes both dresses the same way, and that is all the drama there is.
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It looks like a snapshot, and it is anything but small. The canvas measures 205 by 200 centimeters, almost a perfect square, and the two women are painted life-size. Beach scenes were not usually given that much wall. A canvas of that size was normally kept for a battle, a king or a saint.
Here it carries a mother and her daughter on a summer walk. Sorolla painted it a few months after the biggest triumph of his career, when he could have chosen any subject in the world.
I don't believe the walk is as casual as it looks. The picture is calculated, and the people in it are part of the calculation.
Where had Sorolla just been?
In New York, where the biggest show of his life had just made him famous in America. The Hispanic Society of America, founded by the collector Archer Huntington, opened the exhibition to invited guests on 4 February 1909 and to the public four days later. The walls held 357 paintings.
By the time the show closed on 8 March, 194 of the paintings had been sold and more than 160,000 people had come through the door. It then moved on to Buffalo and Boston, and Sorolla followed it. In Washington he painted a portrait of President William Howard Taft. In May he took the ship home to Spain.
Home was Valencia, the city where JoaquĆn Sorolla was born and where he had painted the beach for twenty years. He stayed through the summer, and his biographer Blanca Pons-Sorolla calls the beach scenes of those months some of his best and most spectacular. The largest of them has no one famous in it, only his wife and his daughter.
What You'll Discover
Who the two women are.
Why a painting looks like a snapshot.
What the sea is really made of.
What became of the house.