Walk on the Beach facts for kids
Quick facts for kids Walk on the Beach |
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| Spanish: Paseo a la orilla del mar / Paseo a orillas del mar | |
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| Artist | Joaquín Sorolla |
| Year | 1909 |
| Medium | oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 205 cm × 200 cm (81 in × 79 in) |
| Location | Sorolla Museum, Madrid |
Walk on the beach (Spanish: Paseo a la orilla del mar or Paseo a orillas del mar), is a 1909 oil on canvas painting by the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla.
Contents
Description
It has a height of 205 cm and a width of 200 cm. and shows the wife and eldest daughter of the painter during a walk on the beach in Valencia. The painting is part of the collection of the Museo Sorolla in Madrid.
Background to the creation of the painting
1909 was extremely successful for Sorolla. He had already been widely received recognized for his paintings and received awards not only in Spain but also in France and Germany, but the year 1909 was a high point in his career. At the invitation of the American art collector Archer M. Huntington, he traveled with his wife and the two older children Maria and Joaquín at the beginning of the year to New York City. Here Huntington had previously opened the Hispanic Society of America that year and in their rooms, should Sorolla showed the first exhibition of his work in the United States. It was Sorolla's first trip across the Atlantic and later adjusting success unpredictable. On February 4, 1909, the opening of the exhibition took place; initially only a few visitors came. This changed gradually as very positive reviews appeared in the newspapers. When it closed on March 8 the exhibition had had a total of 169,000 visitors to see Sorolla's work. Encouraged by the overwhelming response, a slightly modified collection was also shown in Buffalo and Boston. During his stay in the United States Sorolla received 20 portrait commissions, including that of the just-elected US President William Howard Taft, whom he visited in the White House in Washington, D.C. In May 1909, as Sorolla left the United States, he had sold a total of 195 images - including two works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art - and taken in the enormous sum of 181,760 US dollars.
Back in Europe, Sorolla held initially in Paris and exhibited in art exhibition of the Société des Artistes Français, the 1903 painting Evening Sun, an image of fishermen from Valencia. About Madrid he traveled to Valencia, where he saw his daughter Elena and the rest of the family. He attended the local art exhibition Exposicion Regional and received a second award for the work exhibited there. Inspired by the success of his trip to America and the good reviews he received at the exhibitions in Paris and Valencia, he began a prolific summer. He planned in 1911 to travel again on exhibition tour in the United States and needed new paintings. He stayed until the end of September in Valencia and created in these summer months "some of his best and most spectacular beach scenes," as his biographer and granddaughter Blanca Pons-Sorolla notes. The resulting paintings of this summer beach walk provide a climax in Sorolla's career according to José Luis Alcaide.
Sorolla's beach paintings
Born in Valencia, Joaquín Sorolla had been familiar since his youth with life on the sea. In his early work, there is the traditional port view Marina, Barcos en el Puerto with which he made his debut in the art exhibition Expsoición National in Madrid in 1881. In the 1890s he repeatedly returned to the subject of fishermen from Valencia. In some very large paintings, he showed fishermen bringing their catch ashore or pulling their boat onto the beach with oxen. He also portrayed boatbuilders or fishwives, not a glamorous life of leisure activities, but working people at sea. For this work, he received very positive reviews and was awarded prizes. In addition, these works brought international success. The French government bought the painting La Vuelta de la presence from 1895 and the Berlin National Gallery acquired Pescadores Valencianos of 1895.
In 1900 Sorolla began to paint children bathing. In the 1904 painting La hora del baño Sorolla linked fishing and bathing children and portrayed children swimming between a fishing boat and an ox standing in the water. In the foreground one of the children comes from the sea and is awaited by a young woman who stretches out a white cloth to dry the wet child. Already this picture anticipates Sorolla's themes in Walk on the Beach. So the white fabric plays a central role: The movement of the cloth in the wind is already the main subject, the shore area between the water and beach has no clear contours and the whole picture is bathed in the light of early evening.
That same summer Sorolla portrayed his wife Clotilde at Valencia. In Clotilde en la playa the wife sits on a stool near the sea in a white dress. Here as in the later Walk on the Beach, the parasol is already an important prop. The open parasol casts shadows on her face, which is hidden by a veil in the later image. In this picture the painter has taken a slightly elevated position, so that no background horizon line is visible. Instead of the beach in the foreground it goes directly into the waves of the sea, with no sky to be seen.
In 1906, Sorolla and his family visited Biarritz in northern Spain (Note: Biarritz is in France). In the group portrait Paseo de Faro several women walk along the cliffs above the beach. The painter shows here the beach and washed around by underwater rock formation as a background motive. In front of the frieze-like image the women are loosely arranged side by side. Again, white clothing dominates the scene, and only the young girl in the center stands out in a bright red jacket. Large hats and parasols are important props in this image also.
In 1909 he returned to the beach in Valencia and again took up themes depicting people at sea. In the portrait Elena en la playa Sorolla portrayed his youngest daughter in a white dress with the beach as a background. In this portrait, from about the same time as Walk on the Beach, Sorolla painted the meeting of land and sea, the waves of the sea, the dress moving in the wind, a hat and the light of a summer day in the Mediterranean.
Provenance
The painting was until the artist died in his possession. In his will he bequeathed the picture to his son Joaquín Sorolla García. who was the first director of the museum in the former home of his parents, Sorolla Museum. In 1931 Sorolla's wife Clotilde bequeathed the house together with the inventory to the Spanish government, set up with the support for a Joaquín Sorolla museum. The son Joaquín Sorolla García, followed the generous example of his mother and after his death in 1948 bequeathed to the Spanish government the Walk on the Beach painting, along with other works of his father. Since that time, it has belonged to the collection of the Museo Sorolla in Madrid.
