SOROLLA CENTENARY (2023) 1 OZ SILVERID92937003

SOROLLA CENTENARY (2023) SILVER OUNCE

Joaquín Sorolla (Valencia 1863-Cercedilla 1923) studied drawing at the "Escuela de Artesanos de Valencia" and shared a studio with José Vilar y Torres, the Benlliure brothers, and Ignacio Pinazo Camarlench.

He studied the work of Velázquez and other artists at the Prado Museum.

He travelled to Rome, where he became acquainted with classical and Renaissance art, as well as the great museums, and in 1885 he travelled to Paris to study Impressionist painting at close quarters.

In 1888 he married Clotilde García del Castillo in Valencia, and in 1889 the painter and his family settled in Madrid, where, in barely five years, Sorolla achieved great renown as a painter.

In 1894 he travelled again to Paris, where he developed a style of painting known as "Luminism", which was to be characteristic of his work thereafter. He began to paint outdoors, masterfully mastering light and combining it with everyday scenes and landscapes of Mediterranean life. 
Valencia named him a favourite and meritorious son, and a street was named after him.

After many trips around Europe, mainly in England and France, he held an exhibition in Paris with more than half a thousand works, which gave him unusual international recognition, and his pictorial work became known throughout Europe and America.

Much of his unprecedented international success also came from his exhibition in New York in 1909, with works such as "Evening Sun" and "Swimmers", among many others.

He also triumphed in 1911 at the St. Louis Art Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. In November of the same year he was commissioned by the Hispanic Society of America to paint fourteen murals dedicated to the regions of Spain, which were to decorate the halls of the institution.

In 1914 he was appointed an academician and when he finished the works for the Hispanic Society he worked as a teacher of composition and colour at the Madrid School of Fine Arts.

During his career, Joaquín Sorolla accumulated a large number of prizes and honours, both in Spain and abroad, and was one of the most renowned Spanish painters both at home and abroad, and is considered one of the greatest masters of Spanish painting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

"The Horse Bathing (1909)

This canvas is one of a series of scenes of the beach at El Cabañal in Valencia painted by Sorolla in the summer of 1909, and is one of the painter's most popular paintings. Here we see the best-known Sorolla, the one with the symphony of whites and blues that reigns in the paintings of this year, such as the "Paseo a orillas del mar" ("Walk by the Sea").

“Leaving the Bath" (1915)

Painted in the summer of 1915 in Valencia, it shows a woman holding a naked child in her arms, wrapped in a white cloth.

The theme of coming out of the bath and the appearance of white cloths with which to experiment with light and colour became frequent in the painter's output, and he produced numerous versions, encouraged by the popularity of the subject, but also by the visual interest it provided, The same scene offers pieces of dazzling light alongside others of light sifted by the fabrics, glints and reflections on the water and wet skins, and spectacular effects of colour on the whites, where Sorolla's gaze discovers blues, yellows, greens and mauves.