Under the Awning, on the Beach at Zarauz

Today is the birthday of Justyna - our Marketing & Partnerships manager, who has been with us for three years now :) Happy Birthday! :))

In Sorolla times it was very fashionable to spend holidays at a resort. Resorts on the north coast such as San Sebastian, Santander or Biarritz were considered the most suitable for seaside holidays. Especially in the 1930s, visits there were an upper class trend in wealthy families. For Sorolla, who was a Spanish painter whose style was a variant of Impressionism (check out his other pieces in our Archive!) the summers were most often spent at the coast, and he became the chronicler of the ‘at the seaside’ stories. This canvas, painted during the summer of 1910 on the beach at Zarauz, shows the whole Sorolla family, under an awning which is out of sight. The figures are elegantly dressed and the beach is depicted as a setting for bourgeois, cosmopolitan social appearances, rather than for spontaneous enjoyment.