Luminous: The Art of Joaquin Sorolla
November 23, 2009 | David Ferris“My only ambition was to create an honest picture that would interpret nature as she really is, as she ought to be seen,” the impressionist painter Joaquin Sorolla once declared. Sorolla, a Spaniard who painted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was adept at making his art glow with a special kind of light. He drew the Mediterranean sun into his brush and delicately imprinted it on his canvas. The artist has long since left the world, but his painting – and that certain kind of light – still shines.
"Walk on the Beach," Joaquin Sorolla, 1909.
I recently attended a special exhibition of the artist’s work in Huelva, Spain, where a collection works by Sorolla were on loan from the Museo de Bellas Artes in Havana. Sorolla’s artistic influence was more limited than that of some of his contemporaries, but he is best known for advancing the style of impressionist painting called “luminism,” which focused on the careful study of light on people and landscapes. The works are over a century old but remain coolly radiant, as if from a light that springs from their own sun. Sorolla is at his best in his depictions of the coast in early evening, capturing a fleeting quality of light that comes only late in the day, when the sun throws long shadows and a deep, warm glow across the beach. Sorolla may have been something of a one-trick pony, but it’s still a pretty good trick. A temporary Sorolla exhibition in the Museo del Prado in Madrid recently drew half a million visitors, breaking a ten-year attendance record before closing in September. (The most important Sorolla collection is permanently housed in the Museo Sorolla, also in Madrid.)
The artist drew most of his subject matter from the coastal locales of his native Valencia, Spain, but the kind of landscape and light on which his work is based can be seen throughout Mediterranean Europe. His works are rooted in a single, pasing moment but also have a timeless quality. “Walk on the Beach” visualizes a specific instance in a specific place at a specific time, but you can sometimes glimpse the same quality of light in France, Italy, or Greece. One of the most appealing aspects of Sorolla’s art is that it preserves in almost photographic vividness a tranquil moment familiar to so many: the peaceful languor of the last moments at a long day at the beach.
Today, in the right time and place, you can admire the beach splashed with the same golden glow and stretched-out shadows that Sorolla memorialized on canvas a hundred years ago. Luminism lives.
