Sorolla Is Returning to America

After an Absence of Eleven Years, He Is Once More to Visit New York

CHRISTIAN BRINTON

FROM birth Sorolla has been a wonderchild of art, experiencing the extremes of poverty and obscurity, and winning popular success such as has fallen to the lot of few among his contemporaries. Yet even at the height of his vogue, whether in Madrid, Paris, London, or New York, comparatively little was known of the man himself, of his early vicissitudes, or the successive steps by which he achieved his position in the field of contemporary painting. Sorolla, on his first visit to America, burst upon us like a meteor. Arriving unheralded, eleven years ago, he disappeared at the pinnacle of his popularity, leaving us dazed by his advent, yet a little ignorant of his personality and the actual significance of his artistic production. Now, he is about to undertake a second voyage to America. His arrival, which had been planned for the early autumn, has been delayed because of injuries resulting from a severe fall just before the time proposed for leaving Spain. He will return to us, therefore, early in the winter, no longer an obscure figure in American minds, but recognized as one of the most vigorous and versatile of living painters.

The powerful magnet that drew to the Hispanic Museum upwards of one hundred and sixty thousand people in the space of one month, and on a single day—March 7, 1909— attracted the unprecedented number of twentynine thousand four hundred and sixty-one eager enthusiasts to the exhibition, is a modest individual, passionately devoted to his profession and to the endearing intimacy of a happy domestic existence. On the occasion of our first meeting he chatted volubly of art, of America, and of Spain, but was reticent regarding personal matters. "Nada sobre mi!" he would exclaim with a deprecating wave of the hand and a resolute puff at a cigar of heroic proportions and formidable potency. Later, however, we got upon more friendly footing both in New York and during the ensuing summer, when I saw him frequently in his Madrid home and his villa at El Cabanal on the gleaming Yalencian coast. And it was upon such congenial occasions that he frankly discussed his initial struggles, his first public recognition and what his artistic activity, taken as a whole, seems to represent.

Sorolla's Early Life

THE now famous Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida was born in Valencia in humble circumstances, on February 27, 1863. It is sufficient to recall that when he was but two years of age both of the boy's parents were stricken down by cholera and he was left an orphan in the care of his maternal aunt, Dona Isabel Bastida and her husband, Don Jose Piqueres. Displaying scant aptitude for study, the lad was apprenticed to a locksmith and remained at the forge until he entered the local art school, eloquently known as the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos, in Valencia. He here became the favourite pupil of Estruch, and meanwhile had the good fortune to enlist the interest of Don Antonio Garcia, the distinguished Valencian photographer, who acted as his patron for some years, and whose daughter, Dona Clotilda, he eventually married.

The milestones that punctuate the youthful artist's apprentice days were a visit to Madrid at the age of seventeen, when he executed copies after the masterpieces of Velazquez and Ribera in the Prado, and the exhibition, in 1884, of his first important painting entitled The Second of May. As the recipient of a travelling scholarship, awarded by his native city, he next spent considerable time in Italy, and also took a memorable trip to Paris, where he was particularly impressed by a collective exhibition of the works of the masterly Teutonic draughtsman, Adolf von Menzel, and by the sober peasant naturalism of Bastien-Lepage. Menzel and Bastien in reality turned his thoughts from theatric machines such as The Second of May, and from routine devotional subjects like his Burial of the' Saviour, which was executed with approved regard for the classico-religious conventions of the day. The clear-eyed young man, fresh from the sparkling Mediterranean playa, languished amid the aesthetic somnolence of Rome and the pious pretence of Assisi. He only displayed signs of independent vitality in his sensitive view of the Paris Boulevards, which was suggestive of the early work of Pissarro and Raffaelli. There is, in fact, but little of the present-day Sorolia in the series of estudios signed and dated 'J. Sorolia, Roma, 1887', that still adorn the walls of the Academia de San Carlos.

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Upon his return to Spain, Sorolia was fated to taste the bitter savour of struggle and obscurity. Undeniably poor, he supported himself mainly through the sale of water colour sketches, which he disposed of at extremely unpretentious figures. One particular landscape, he recalls, fetched the princely compensation of seven pesetas, while he executed a number of small portrait heads at five pesetas each. The tide finally turned, in 1892, when he exhibited in Madrid his Otra Margarita, a canvas which in the following year found its way across the ocean to the Chicago Exposition, and to-day reposes in the permanent collection of the City Art Museum in St. Louis. The success of Otra Margarita was paralleled by the artist's debut, at the Salon des Champs Elys£es, in 1893, since which date the fertile Valencian has been literally encumbered by medals and honours of every description. He furthermore possesses the distinction of having held three of the most imposing and sensational one-man shows in the annals of modem art.

The Return from Fishing

SUCCESSFUL as were such appealing studies in social sympathy as Otra Margarita and its pendant, Trata de Blancas, Sorolla's real artistic destiny was not made manifest until the appearance of his Return from Fishing, at the Paris Salon of 1894. Here, at last, was the veritable Sorolia the dexterous master of form, the magic manipulator of chromatic effect, the iridescent luminist, who was shortly to attain unprecedented vogue in exhibition room and gallery. Within a remarkably brief space of time he became an avowed pictorial pantheist who held in contempt all prearranged compositions, all questions of theory or thesis. His inspiration became popular life itself as he found it ready at hand. His sphere of activity was the radiant strand of El Cabanal or the even more richly luminous reaches of the coast of Javea, some hundred miles further south. His art was a species of sun worship in which sheer solar radiance occupied a position never before attained in paint. Realism, with him, was transformed into a luminism that in itself became the central motive of each successive picture.

With the exception of _ The Sad Inheritance, which at present hangs in the Church of the Ascension in New York City, the subsequent work of Sorolia has constituted a perpetual canticle to youth, the flashing wave, glowing orchard, garden, and that dazzling vibrancy of the meridional sun which diffuses its violet-blonde glory alike over man and nature. The only change in his art has been in the direction of concentration and intensification. While it has broadened in scope and range of subject with the ensuing years, yet its spirit remains essentially the same. And whether you encounter it upon the walls of the leading museums of Europe, America, or our sister Continent to the South, its appeal is immediate and imperative. A Sorolia canvas with its sparkling luminosity and unstudied presentation of actuality, is indeed unmistakable anywhere.

That which first impresses one upon surveying in congenial perspective the work of the Valencian master, is the man's extraordinary productivity. The memorable exhibition at the Georges Petit Galeries, which took Paris by storm in June, 1906, contained five hundred items, two hundred of which were oil paintings, the balance being sketches. The exhibition at the Grafton Gallery, London, in 1908, included two hundred and seventy-eight numbers, while the most successful display of all, that at the Hispanic Museum in New York, during February and March, 1909, totalled three hundred and fiftysix separate titles. In order to make such a showing it is obvious that Sorolla must be a rapid workman, and as to this, anyone who has had the good fortune to see him at his easel will readily testify.

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If, perchance, you suffer from diffidence and need a lesson in artistic self-confidence, all you require would be a day passed at El Cabafial, watching the magic Valencian painting in the burning sun, often bare headed, and even minus the proverbial white umbrella. The shining sea marge is his studio, and his models scamper in and out of the dancing surf or majestically beach their big-sailed fishing boats in the amber glow of the Mediterranean sunset. Sorolla makes no preliminary studies, and whether his subject be a fugitive thumbox impression, or a fifteen-foot canvas, he paints with the same bewildering speed and impetuosity. A portrait he will sometimes complete at a single sitting, and an important composition in four or five sessions of unremitting concentration.

His Rapid Execution

SOROLLA is of course conscious of the fact that rapidity of notation is essential to his particular form of graphic expression. "My work, which is always, if possible, done out of doors, cannot", he says, "admit of deliberate execution. If I were to paint slowly", he adds, "I positively could not paint at all". On another occasion, he amplified the same idea after the following fashion. "It is by speed alone that one can attain an appearance of fleeting effect, and when an artist begins to niggle and become conscious of his stroke, instead of swiftly transcribing nature as he sees it, he is lost. The perpetual preoccupation with technical considerations at the expense of unified sincerity of observation and rendering is the chief fault I find in the work of many of our modern painters".

You have here the artistic confession of one of the most brilliant executants in the history of paint, for Sorolla obviously finds place in that quartette of surpassing technicians which includes Sargent, Besnard, and the fluent Swede Anders Zorn, who has just laid aside his burin and brush. Standing before a canvas without preconception of any description, Sorolla transcribes for us the visible world as he beholds it in all its insistent actuality, its infinite diversity of form and movement, and its vibrant verity of colouration. Realistic in essence, and basing itself upon the simple facts of everyday existence, this art yet rises at times to a pitch of luminous lyricism which endows it with a significance of its own. For while it cannot be held that Sorolla recreates life for us, he assuredly succeeds in endowing fragments of life with something of his own superb creative vitality.

Though he paints in the burning glare of noontide as did poor Vincent at Arles, Sorolla has not given us anything approaching a solar synthesis. This art is physical not metaphysical, and herein lies both its strength and its weakness. And having been the first Spaniard to flood his canvases with the actual light of day, Sorolla naturally cannot be classed among those artistas avanzados who have since sought to suppress atmospheric effect and concentrate their energies upon the solution of more or less esoteric problems of line, mass, and significant form.

The phenomenal success achieved by the art of Sorolla y Bastida with the American public is not difficult to comprehend. Its appeal, which was both psychological and aesthetic, is addressed directly to our visual sensibilities without recourse to any adventitious media. Tonic in its effect, the Sorolla exhibiton serves to release certain artistic repressions which dated from a period when we were prone to view reality through the pallid film of Puritan reticence rather than frankly, with blithe pagan delight in the shimmer of the sun and joyous bodily abandon. America has, however, no reason to regret the enthusiastic welcome accorded the fecund Spaniard. The chief thing for a young nation, such as ours, to fear, alike in art and in life, is not spontaneous appreciation but a deliberate suppression of that creative rhythm which is the inspiration of Sorolla's radiant visions of Hispania.