Joaquín Sorolla. Painting. Biography and works at Spain is culture.

Styles

In this section you can search all our contents throughout the different stages in the history of art in Spain to find styles such as Baroque, Gothic, Mudéjar and many, many more.

Modernism and Avant-garde movements The turn of the century brought new winds of modernity. The aesthetic sensibility of the time was marked by a different, freer attitude towards art and life.

Topics

In this section you can search among all our contents by topic to find the different resources available in Spain, such as museums, routes, destinations, monuments and many, many more.

Audience

This section provides access to all the contents in a personalised way, according to your own particular interests and socio-demographic profile.

Professionals

Families

Autonomous Regions

This section provides access to the contents in each autonomous region by browsing through maps.

Artists and creators / Modernism and avant-garde movements

Joaquín Sorolla

Add to favourites

Joaquín Sorolla. 'Self-portrait'. Sorolla Museum, Madrid © Ministerio de Cultura

Speciality

Painting

Date of birth

Feb 28, 1863

Date of death

Aug 10, 1923

"Painter. He is considered to be Spanish Impressionism at its finest. His paintings of the Levantine coast gained early-on international recognition."

Facebook

Born in Valencia in 1863, he began his artistic studies in 1877 with sculptor Cayetano Capuz and later studied at the Fine Arts Academy in San Carlos. From a young age he was interested in open-air painting, with which he tried to capture Mediterranean lighting, both in the farmlands of Valencia and on the beach, just as the French Impressionists did. He finished his education in Paris and Rome. After returning to Spain in 1890, he settled in Madrid and began a trajectory marked by success, awards and important positions. Among his preferred subjects are Levantine waterfront scenes, always with human presence and expressed with an absolute prominence of light. He died in Madrid in 1923.

Essential works

The Castilian herdsman

This work was painted by Sorolla for the project entitled “The regions of Spain”, commissioned by Archer Milton Huntington to decorate the library of The Hispanic Society of America in New York.

A Coruña Museum of Fine Arts (La Coruña)
More info
Boys on the beach

This is one of Sorolla’s characteristic light-filled scenes in the style which made this artist so popular.

Prado Museum (Madrid)
More info
Self-portrait

A cleansed composition with hardly any specific spatial references, using Velázquez’s portraits as a reference point.

Sorolla Museum (Madrid)
More info
Clotilde seated on the Sofa

A bourgeois portrait typical of the period of the artist’s wife.

Sorolla Museum (Madrid)
More info
The Young Yachtsman

One of Sorolla’s best known work and a clear example of his painting as a recreation of sensations.

Sorolla Museum (Madrid)
More info