Strolling along the Seashore

You may have noticed, each month we feature a new collection. This month from April 3rd to April 24th, we will present four pieces created by Joaquín Sorolla from Museo Sorolla in Madrid.

Sorolla excelled in the painting of portraits, landscapes, and monumental works of social and historical themes. His most typical works are characterized by a dexterous representation of the people and landscape bathed in sunlight on his native land. Painted during the summer of 1909 at the beach in Valencia after Sorolla’s triumphant success in the United States, Strolling along the Seashore is undoubtedly one of the artist’s most important works. The water and the sandy seashore, shown as long blue, purple and turquoise brushstrokes, become an abstract backdrop for the refined figures of the artist’s wife Clotilde and their daughter Maria.

The suggestion of the breeze in their floating draperies intensifies the fleeting moment captured here by the artist. The use of a photograph is evident in the cropped frame cutting through Clotilde’s wide-brimmed straw hat and leaving an empty swathe of sand in the lower foreground. Although this is the same setting as in other Valencia seashore scenes, the tone here is very different. What we see here is a perfect example of the iconographic genre of the ‘elegant promenade’ with well-dressed bourgeois figures strolling along the seashore. I hope you will be delighted by his works, like we are. Enjoy!