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Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, “The Tuna Catch,” (Ayamonte),
1919
about 12x15 feet, The Hispanic Society
of America
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Painters don’t exit the No. 1 subway train at 157th
Street and Broadway to dine on cuchifritos or have
their eyebrows threaded. They are there
to visit the Holy Grail for lovers of Bravura painting at The
Hispanic Society of America at 155th Street
and Broadway. Soon they will stand in
awe before the 14 mural-size canvases depicting the provinces of Spain
that Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida executed on commission for the railroad heir Archer
Milton Huntington. Sorolla’s paintings,
each ranging from about 12 to 14 feet in height and totaling 227 feet in
length, cover the walls in a room specially constructed to house them in Huntington’s
palatial edifice devoted to the culture of Spain.
Sorolla’s “Vision of Spain,” which he began in 1913 and
completed in 1919, represents one of the major achievements in the history of
painting, if only for its scale alone.
Rubens and Tintoretto would be green with envy if they saw what Sorolla
had accomplished. These were no mere
Renaissance formula figures on canvas, with Seraphim and Cherubim cavorting in
the heavens. There were no able studio
assistants standing at the ready to fill in the blanks around the Master’s central
figures. Sorolla’s canvases are filled
with real people painted life-size and from life by one man in possession of
prodigious skills and the enormous energy necessary to complete this
mind-boggling project.
Painters know what effort it takes to make even a semi-decent life-size bust portrait come to life on a
24 by 20 inch canvas when painted alla prima.
After a couple of hours work you’re exhausted and longing for a nap and
someone to wash your brushes for you. Sorolla
painted multiple figures on canvas in that manner throughout his career, all in natural poses and brimming with
the impression of life itself.
Drawing the entire human figure dead-on accurately in a
direct attack on canvas with a fully loaded brush is nearly impossible, as
those who have tried it soon discover. Even
excellent painters like Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase fell short of
the mark nine times out of ten in one aspect or another – proportions and
gestures among them. And hands must be
in pockets or held behind the back, of course, if you are going to succeed.
Then you have to master color and chiaroscuro to breathe life into just one
figure, much less a multitude. Sorolla
was one of the very few artists who had all the tools for such work.
For a period of only 50 years or so in the long history of
art, Sorolla and a few contemporaries, Zorn and Sargent among them, painted one
figurative masterpiece after another entirely from life, and then, like
dinosaurs and other giants of the past, their like just disappeared from the
face of the earth. But none of those
contemporaries came close to matching Sorolla’s heroic last stand on display at
the Hispanic Society of America. To top
it off, Sorolla was no kid when he took on this work. He was already 48 years old.
Despite the immense size of the canvases, Sorolla painted
all but one of then en plein air. He
worked in a studio on his first painting.
All the other massive paintings were completed on location, painting
models from life posing in the costumes of their respective regions. That first painting, a conjoined panoramic
view of two regions, Castile and Leon, featuring hilltop towns and a bread festival, was painted in
a specially constructed studio outside Madrid
from March until September of 1913. It
is the largest painting in the series at 45 feet long, and with more than 100
life-size figures. This studio effort,
for me, is the least interesting of the lot, although a colossal undertaking to
be sure. The composition is uninteresting
and the figures static, unlike the vivacious figures and excellent compositions
of the plein air paintings.
I suspect Sorolla was warming up to the assignment and used
a few photographs to get this initial mural out of the way so he could get to
his first love, and his strength – painting figures from life in the great sunlit
outdoors, a routine that was observed and recounted by many of his
contemporaries. And he painted
fast. "I could not paint at all if
I had to paint slowly,” Sorolla once said.
“Every effect is so transient, it must be rapidly painted.”
I was deeply moved when reading about the eyewitness account of a young student of Sorolla’s, Santiago Martinez Martin, who observed the completion of this final masterpiece of alla prima painting. Martinez Martin's recollections are detailed in an essay in a catalogue for a traveling Sorolla exhibition that I viewed several times at the IBM Gallery in 1989. Worn out from his work on this commisson, Sorolla "had to caution himself against the heightened emotionalism he experienced while painting, for, ‘after a few hours…I’m undone, exhausted.’”
Martinez Martin "witnessed how Sorolla, often using yard-long brushes, in one morning painted a catch of tuna as it was delivered from ship to pier, covering almost 10 [feet] by more than 3 feet of the vital foreground of the Ayamonte panel in a single session.” When the younger painter approached, Sorolla was slumped in exhaustion before the large canvas and was "regarding it with feverish eyes." And in a visceral way, we are transported to the scene. We understand, we know.
On July 20, 1919, Sorolla wrote, “Now, with God’s help and after considerable suffering…I have given the final brush-stroke to the commission. The panel I painted in Ayamonte, in its background the coast of Portugal which I had before me, is splendidly satisfying [and] I believe the finest of all.”
You come to realize that Sorolla literally worked and worried himself to death on this commission, for which he received a payment of $150,000 from Huntington. I’m sure that was big money then, but Sorolla was doing very well without it. Just before accepting the commission, he had pulled in $80,000 from sales and commissions during a five-month exhibition of his work in Chicago and St. Louis in 1911, his second highly successful trip to America.
The painter had anticipated spending five years on the project for the Hispanic Society, but it took him seven years of single-handed effort to complete his “Vision of Spain,” and he never lived to see its installation. The very next year he suffered a stroke while painting a woman’s portrait in his garden in Madrid. Paralyzed for over three years, Sorolla died at the age of 60 in 1923. The room housing the Provinces at the Hispanic Society opened to the public in 1926.
A couple of years ago, the Sorolla room was renovated and his mural paintings were restored. Both are looking much finer than when I last saw them 15 years ago. At that time, the wide swaths of turpentine washes that Sorolla had used to cover huge background expanses were showing signs of erosion.
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Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, “The Fish” (Catalonia),
1915
about 12x15 feet, Hispanic Society of America
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A glass-topped, counter-height cabinet that was in the center of the room has been removed, and now the sight lines are much better for the paintings, which have been lowered to almost eye level. That cabinet housed Sorolla memorabilia, including faded photographs of some of the costumed models, whom Sorolla had most certainly painted directly from life. As I was studying his magnificent murals, three middle-aged ladies were examining the photographs in the cabinet. I heard one of them exclaim to her friends, “That’s what they really looked like!” End of Story. Not even the great Sorolla could win them over!
