Sorolla: The technique of a master

This is the first major exhibition of Sorolla's paintings in the United Kingdom since 1908. We see in the exhibition Sorolla developing as a master of painterly technique. We begin with some of the works on social themes where he is using very often a dark palette. We see him then engaging them with the specific Spanish tradition of Goya and Velázquez. Velázquez for people of that generation was a kind of god. He was the first person who was able to replicate reality. Velázquez is the great master of black, the great master of pulling depth out of that, and certainly you see Sorolla attempting to do something of the same thing. After 1900 we see the extraordinary embrace of sunlight as his principal theme, the ways in which he finds to open up his canvases through brighter, bolder touches of colour, and finally in works of the late years when he's often working on a very large scale, composition becomes more and more and more informal and the play of paint takes over a greater, greater role in evoking form. Sorolla was extremely aware of photography and of the possibilities it opened up for him. I think he felt he could achieve in colour some of the casual aspects that photography had introduced into visual experience. Photography opened up a whole new repertoire of images. The way that he crops compositions, exaggerated angles, the way he replicates pattern is the sort of thing that would catch the eye of a photographer. In his garden pictures he is painting famous monuments that every Spaniard would recognise, but often choosing oblique, strange, unexpected angles and using water and reflection a great deal, we see Sorolla's mastery of his technique. It's marvellous that he can play these quite different styles simultaneously. He can go from idiom to idiom, he's not going to be tagged as one thing or another. In his final years he's very often painting his family on a large scale in compositions that are extraordinarily free and open and where the play of paint has as much fascination as what is being depicted.