ALTHOUGH OUTDOOR PAINTING was already fashionable in Sorolla’s time, it was only after the turn of the century that he fully embraced it. For Sorolla, painting outdoors was both exhilarating and challenging. It demanded working quickly, often in unpredictable weather, while capturing fleeting effects of light before they disappeared. Yet it was precisely this light that became central to his art. More than just illumination, light shaped colour, atmosphere, and emotion in his paintings, making it the driving force of his artistic vision.
"When all the artists painted in the studios, he painted outdoors; when a filtered and conventional light, with the pallor of consumption, he brutally grasped the rays of the sun on the tips of his brushes and fixed them on his canvases."
- Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867–1928), Sorolla's close friend and inspiration from Valencia, commented on his work in a newspaper extract published at the time of Sorolla’s death. Blasco admired his friend’s courage, noting that Sorolla painted outdoors as often as the weather allowed. This was the most difficult path, since studio painting offered the safety of controlled conditions, especially with regard to light.
Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863–1923) lived during a period when the everyday experience of light was being transformed. From the end of the 19th century, technical progress made both natural and artificial light increasingly accessible. Some large European cities had introduced night lighting as early as the 17th century, with Paris leading the way, followed by Amsterdam, Berlin, London, and Vienna.
As with many inventions, Spain adopted the change later. During the 18th century, many cities introduced oil-based lighting systems, though these remained costly and difficult to maintain. The decisive breakthrough came with the arrival of gas. From the early 19th century, street lamps, shop windows, and cafés in major cities were illuminated by gaslight, making nighttime life more pleasant and far less dangerous. In Spain, the main cities began to be lit by gas from the middle of the century.
The true revolution in domestic lighting, however, came with the widespread introduction of electricity at the beginning of the 20th century.
By this time, Sorolla had already turned decisively toward outdoor subjects, which offered him both his greatest temptations and his greatest visual challenges. Painting outdoors demanded complete attention to the constant changes in light throughout the day. The shifting seasons, the colours of shadows, the play of reflections, the sea with its shifting transparencies, the glow of backlighting, and the subtle gradations of colour on the chromatic scale—all presented him with problems to solve. In the end, Sorolla discovered that these challenges could be mastered in the vast spaces of the sea and its beaches.
The Spanish intellectual, landscape painter, politician, and art critic Aureliano de Beruete (1845–1912) wrote of Sorolla’s work around 1901:
“Sorolla saw early, and with great sagacity, what is good and true in Impressionism and in the various phases it presents, and he immediately assimilated it. Thus, we see outlaws from his palette, to paintings painted in the open air, brown colours and blacks, not very transparent, which until not long ago were preferred by painters for shadows. On the other hand, their canvases offer a great variety of blue and violet inks, opposed to the yellow and red, with which and the discreet use of white, he obtains very happy accords and very bright and daring colour effects.”
Here, Sorolla is seen in San Sebastián, painting a quick impression with his portable paint box and brush, looking elegant in his modern suit.
Over the course of his life, Sorolla created nearly two thousand oil paintings on very small cardboard supports. He referred to them as notes, stains, or colour notes. This format became increasingly popular among major artists of the nineteenth century, as it allowed them to rapidly capture ideas or impressions of what they observed. These works often stood on their own as independent pieces, going beyond the function of a simple preparatory sketch.
From 1906 onwards, Valencia became Sorolla’s preferred place to paint outdoors, drawing his models directly from nature. He often depicted fishermen and their wives, as well as children and young people playing on the beach.
The works he created on the Valencian shore display the most characteristic features of his art, particularly the clarity and luminosity produced by direct sunlight. Executed with remarkable speed, these scenes are dynamic and vibrant, marked by strong, visible brush strokes, sometimes broad, sometimes choppy.
Rather than blending, Sorolla favoured saturated colours, emphasizing the dominance of blue, sand, orange, yellow, pink, and white.
In the summer of 1909, Sorolla moved to the beach at La Malvarrosa in Valencia, where he felt truly happy. His triumph in Europe was followed by further success in the United States, and the acclaim his works received from critics was matched only by the enthusiastic reception on the market, which demanded an increasing number of his paintings.
Sorolla paid tribute to modern life by depicting the holiday activities of the bourgeoisie on the northern coasts of Spain and France. In 1906, he created the famous painting Snapshot, Biarritz.
The work shows his wife, Clotilde, relaxing in the dunes. She holds one of the very first Kodak pocket cameras. Sorolla cropped and blurred the composition to imitate a photograph, giving the painting a modern and elegant presentation.
Even after completing his major works and settling into his new, modern house in Madrid, Sorolla continued to paint outdoors in his beautiful gardens.
In the end, a stroke took his ability to work and, eventually, his life. Yet it was a life full of challenges, both on and off the canvas, and I feel truly inspired by his dedication and passion every time I teach about him or see his work at gallery exhibitions.
Karla Ingleton Darocas B.A. (Hons)
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Resource Books written by
Karla Ingleton Darocas
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and published by
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