SOROLLA CENTENARY (2023) GOLD COINID92937002

SOROLLA CENTENARY (2023) GOLD COIN

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.

"Self-portrait (1909)

This self-portrait is one of eight in the museum. Dedicated to Clotilde, like most of them, although he portrays himself in the studio and in the middle of painting, he covers his head with an elegant grey felt hat, following a long tradition among painters of self-portraits in formal dress rather than in working clothes. In this portrait, painted for the intimacy of his family, he displays great technical freedom, making the most of the material qualities of the paint, combining the almost liquid brushstroke with very impastoed strokes and drawing the viewer's attention to the gesture and the intensity of the gaze.

"Clotilde in a Grey Dress (1900)

Of all Sorolla's images of Clotilde, this is probably the kindest and most cheerful. Clotilde is thirty-five years old, but her appearance is very youthful. The sober grey suit, in the fashion of the time, has bulging shoulders and a high collar, and shows little of her bust, letting the fabric fall over her belt. It is a portrait in the 1900s, reminiscent of Ramón Casas's style: simple spatial organisation, fluid drawing, muted colour range. Clotilde's natural elegance is perfectly in tune with her surroundings