Joaquín Sorolla The Master
of Light

From an orphaned Valencian boy to the western world's master of sunlight.

Left without parents before he was three, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida rose from the streets of Valencia to the salons of Paris and the museums of America, garlanded in his own lifetime as the finest painter of light the age had seen. I've spent more than thirty years visiting his paintings wherever I can find them — this site is my own record of that admiration, and an attempt to help others discover him too.

The pictures most people know are the beach paintings — Children on the Beach, The Horse's Bath, Strolling Along the Seashore — made on the wet sand at Valencia in the years either side of 1900, at the speed the light demanded. Before them came the darker canvases of his twenties, Sad Inheritance and The White Slave Trade, which won him his first medals and, I suspect, taught him how to draw.

He was one of the great portrait painters of his day as well — Clotilde again and again, his own children, Louis Comfort Tiffany in a white suit at his easel in a blaze of garden flowers — and he gave the last working years of his life to the Vision of Spain, fourteen enormous panels of the Spanish regions painted for the Hispanic Society in New York. He delivered the final panel in 1919; a stroke in his own Madrid garden the following summer ended his painting life.