“Sublime, immense, the best I know for painting,” Joaquín Sorolla wrote to his beloved Clotilde in 1905. He was talking about Jávea, the beach that painted so many summers: the sun in a thousand reflections on the sea, the children playing on the shore, the most luminous blue… Pure Mediterranean and joie de vivre: pure Sorolla. However, there were other summers on the Cantabrian coast that revealed another facet of the painter, with cold and gray colors, threatening waters, stormy skies…
Sorolla’s Summers contrasts these two visions in the Recoletos Room of Fundación MAPFRE in a small but exquisite exhibition, with 15 oil paintings and 25 “color notes”, as the painter himself called them and which are brushstrokes on small cardboard. fleeting impressions, sketches that would later become paintings… «Far from living them as a time of rest, Sorolla spends his summers devoted to his most beloved and most successful pictorial theme: the scenes, captured from nature, that develop in the environment of the sea,” says Casilda Ybarra, curator of the exhibition.
Of its dazzling Mediterranean scenes, the almost two-meter-long canvas Nadadora stands out, with a sea that is sun and Clotilde swimming on the beach of Jávea. A few meters away, a break occurs, the collision with the Paseo del breakwater of San Sebastián on a stormy day, dark as Sorolla never is, disturbing and almost bordering on abstraction. “In contrast to the Mediterranean works, in those from the north we do not find such direct contact with the water or the sun; the figures appear elegantly dressed and bathing scenes are not represented,” says Ybarra. In San Sebastián, Zarauz and Biarritz, Sorolla paints bourgeois leisure: elegant walks, ladies in long dresses and hats, reading under the awning, cafes facing the sea… But always the sea.
