Similar to my opinion of John Singer Sargent, I think that the place of Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida in the canon of great painters in art history is vastly understated.
Sorolla has enjoyed something of a renaissance in the last 20 years or so. His popularity is continuing to rise, and resources for his images on the net are growing.
Iain Vellacott, who maintains a nice resource site on Sorolla called Sorolla Paintings pointed out this morning on his Twitter feed a surprisingly extensive selection of Sorolla paintings posted to a site called Art might.
On the downside, many are in desperate need, if not beyond the help of color correction; some are repeats (occasionally with better color), and a number of them are obviously scanned from books or magazines without benefit of de-screening.
On the upside, most of them have pretty good color, and it’s a cache of perhaps 200 images of Sorolla paintings, many of which I haven’t seen reproduced on the web before. Some are familiar, but quite a few are of the kind of work that doesn’t often get reproduced in books, quick studies and sketches, often with a wonderfully gestural quality.
There are older, more academic set pieces and portraits, as well as quick landscape studies and rare still life subjects.
There are as of this writing 11 pages of thumbnails, each with 20 images. Clicking on the thumbnail leads to an intermediate sized image; clicking on that leads to the largest version of the image.
(Interestingly, each intermediate image is accompanied by a palette of colors extracted from the image. Clicking on the color circle at the bottom of that leads to other paintings by various artists with a similar color scheme. Clicking on an individual color in the palette leads to other paintings by other artists in which that color is predominant.)
The images, though not as large as I might like (they rarely are) at least are of a size to get a good feeling for the work. The variety alone, and the impression it gives of the scope of Sorolla’s work, is worth the visit.
Vellacott’s own Sorolla Paintings site also has a small gallery of Sorolla’s paintings; the color reproduction in these is much more reliable.
You can find some additional resources on my previous posts about Sorolla, listed below.
Wow! I wish I could paint like that. Alas my skills are more cartoonish. Thanks Charle for this one!
Wonderful resource for Sorolla, lots I haven’t seen before. But did you see all the van Gogh’s on that site? Wow.
Gorgeous! I’m an instant fan of his work.
Can you recommend any affordable books on either Sorolla or Sargeant?
I recommend several books on Sargent in my post here, see also this Squidoo lens. Unfortunately, I don’t know of a readily available, inexpensive book on Sorolla.
Sorolla … one of my very favorites! Thanks for posting this article.
Alas, I have not had the pleasure of seeing his work recently in any museums (unlike Sargent). Truly an underrated master!
Thanks, Charley, for the chance to see more of this great painter!
Thanks for introducing me to this amazing artist. I love his palette !
These are breathtaking. I love his palette -especially the shadows. The portraits are particularly emotional and psychological. And the movement of his strokes makes everything seem alive.
These paintings are amazing. The light and shade in the 5th one is fantastic. A very talented man.