The sensuous quality of paint in Joaquín Sorolla’s paintings draws the viewer in, capturing light, movement, and fleeting moments with an epiphanic authenticity. A Spanish painter born in Valencia, Sorolla was inspired by the brilliance of light, the sea, and the colorful customs of the Valencian Community. He paints scenes dominated by color and light with human forms – beaches, landscapes, portraits, and more. Sorolla is affectionately known as the Spanish Master of Light, the reasoning for which is evident in his consistently bright and vivid painting style. He captivates the viewer with his rendering of dynamic light, which transforms itself in innumerable hues. In Joaquín Sorolla’s paintings, the artist, the viewer, and the light are intimately connected by the artist’s kinetic, light-filled venture and the viewer’s epiphany. Analysis of Sorolla’s 1915 painting, After Bathing, demonstrates the epiphanic qualities of light and movement in Sorolla’s artwork.
Valencia, with its abundant luminescence, is the heart of Sorolla’s artistic inspiration and identity. Sorolla describes Valencia as a “splendid spectacle of so much light and colour,” joyously inspiring him throughout his life. He painted After Bathing while spending the summer resting with his family in Valencia, and the paintings he created during that summer refreshed him during an intense period working on a commissioned series of paintings – Vision of Spain. This is a monumental series of fourteen paintings, “representing the customs and costumes of the various provinces of Spain”. This series was an emotionally draining, high-pressure commission, as the culmination of Sorolla’s painting career and identity as a Valencian. In this way, Sorolla identifies with the light; the light and color of Valencia is a part of him. Sorolla carries his light-filled identity and intense passion through each of his paintings, and After Bathing, among other beach scenes he painted during his summer break in Valencia, revitalized him.
Sorolla’s detailed yet free-flowing brushstrokes capture transience in a way that feels effortless. Despite his free-flowing paint application, Sorolla captures impressively life-like subjects that feel like they are from a vanishing moment. His painterly style is rooted in a foundation of naturalistic drawing, for which he received accolades from a young age. Building from his foundation as a technical drawer, Sorolla continually refined his painting style until establishing his sketch-like technique and increasingly vibrant color palette around 1900, concurrently becoming one of the most successful artists of his time.
After Bathing becomes increasingly energetic when the viewer engages through close looking; manifold colors, shapes, and forms of light materialize in each layer of the painting. This close looking makes the viewer active with the work, creating a relationship between artist and viewer through the medium of the painting. Sorolla initiates this relationship through subtle variations in color and light, creating motion in the scene and evoking emotion in the active viewer. After Bathing commands the viewer’s gaze, drawing in the eye with vibrant color and moving the eye through the composition with lively brushstrokes. Examining the sky – the furthest in the background and seemingly the least interesting part of the composition – one notices it is rich with character. There is a subdued rainbow of color through the sky – pinks and purples peek through on the top right, which transition to greens and oranges, which mix into blues and greys toward the top left. Each brushstroke varies in its hue, saturation, and luminosity, and while some color transitions are seamless, others are intentionally chunky with visible brushstrokes. The most unexpected part of this sky is a reddish aura which seems to emanate from the top of an illuminated white sheet covering the two primary figures.
There is a “third” created in this meeting of the sky and the sheet – a third color and light form that manifests when two others meet. This colorful rendezvous feels epiphanic; the third has a kind of actuality, a striking sense of aliveness. The third helps the painting feel more accurate to one’s vision; we see the world constantly in motion, so colors constantly meet and change with the light’s variation. The detail of the third exemplifies Sorolla’s ability to depict light and color magically, which elicits an epiphany in his viewer. This epiphany moves the viewer, teleporting them to the Valencian coast through a “remarkable uncanny actuality”.
The third amplifies motion in the composition, making it radiate with lifelikeness. After Bathing feels expressively accurate and alive with this subtlety, communicating the feeling of the scene through dynamic motion. Thirds appear throughout the water as well, with waves flowing and crashing into one another.
Some of these color meetings are soft, with browns and blues blending harmoniously. Others have sharp edges and more obvious lines distinguishing forms. Some of these lines are color-on-color, and others take the form of highlights – flashes of white, glints of light. Each of these thirds make the scene glow. These spectacular details are Sorolla’s gifts to the viewer who engages with his paintings through close looking.
Although the light is intrinsically embedded in After Bathing, the more time the viewer spends looking at this painting, the more they can absorb from the piece. One can stare at an artwork for hours and still have more left to notice, and with this time, epiphanies can develop, transform, and grow stronger. The more time the viewer spends viewing an artwork, the more they can uncover, as time is “a productive or formative force in itself”. Light here stimulates sight and the viewer’s emotional response – the epiphany, a glimmer within the self. Thus, although the light is epiphanically within the painting, the viewer’s relationship with the piece can grow more powerful with more time spent engaging with it.
Light is defined as “the sensation aroused by stimulation of the visual receptors,” and both the artist in creating and the viewer in perceiving After Bathing experience this sensation. The artist’s and the viewer’s experiences of the same light induce a relationship between them through Sorolla’s painting. In 1915, Sorolla stood on the beach of Valencia, experienced this luminous, stimulating light-filled scene, and felt called to capture it. Sorolla’s relationship with and passion for light therefore compelled him to create this painting. The artist “portray[s] the truth for which [they are] convinced,” and for Sorolla, there is no greater truth than the luminosity ofValencia. The viewer gets to experience this glowing moment with Sorolla because of the accuracy with which he immortalized it. Sorolla “aspire[d] to stop, to capture, to save and to externalize in his painting the fleeting aspects of the reality, with all its ephemeral colours, of what he saw around him, all that caused him to become more and more excited as he set out to achieve it”. By externalizing his reality, Sorolla makes an offering to his viewers, sharing a moment from his ventures through his life to this fleeting moment in Valencia. This gift, given over a century ago, creates a time-spanning exchange between artist and viewer of an ephemeral, luminous experience, further developing the relationship between artist, viewer, and light.
Sorolla expertly captures the fleeting nature of life and light. He expresses a specific moment in time with enthusiastic brushstrokes, despite the day continuing and the sun changing positions. With his mastery of painting fundamentals, Sorolla is successful in capturing motion and aliveness quickly, transferring the energetic movement of his paintbrush to the movement of his subject. Sorolla argues, “By speed only can you gain an appearance of fleeting effect”. So, he painted en plein air, capturing transient scenes with decisive brushstrokes. In real time while viewing his subject, Sorolla’s own physical movements – brushing across the large canvas to create a wave, vertically striping the woman’s dress – create the movement that the painting expresses to the viewer.
Sorolla is himself a part of his paintings through his translation of transient movement, and the fleeting moments he encapsulates are epiphanic. The movement in After Bathing is striking because of how Sorolla illuminates his subject, using many compelling bright whites and luminous color variations within a single wave. This dazzling movement spans the entire canvas, so there is nowhere for the viewer to go but deeper into the piece. This is what an epiphany is – a powerful kind of powerlessness to what calls us. He lucidly composes the woman’s shirt with bold brushstrokes in different colors and directions, and although her body feels cohesive, its individual lines are clear. Her hair and face are also highly brushed, with striated blocks composing parts of her head. These swift yet deliberate collections of brushstrokes are inspiring flashes of Sorolla’s brilliance. His mastery as a painter is clear by the way he involves the viewer in his paintings through the epiphanic portrayal of light and movement.
The wind, as Sorolla depicts it, has a distinctive role in this scene as the driving force of much of its motion. The sheet flies up into the sky with the wind and waves crash into one another by the wind’s will. Even the sky seems blustery, and the boat seems to tilt slightly as it is pushed side to side. The woman leans back with the wind, and her clothing is dynamic. The sand looks as if a wave has just receded backward from it, dragging grains of sand out toward the sea. The person in the sea lurches forward into the wind, muscling their way through the strong waves.The whole scene is in motion, and the viewer can feel the wind that is causing this dynamism. The wind therefore plays a role in the viewer’s epiphany, as it controls these figures and the world they inhabit. Sorolla, as the generator of the wind, thus interacts with the viewer.
Light makes Sorolla’s color palette vibrant and unique. Waves crash into brilliant whitecaps. The woman’s skirt bursts with saturated pinks. These highlights create secondary focal points throughout the composition, emphasizing the scene’s motion and drawing the viewer’s eye around the painting. Once again, with this, the viewer actively engages with the painting and therefore with Sorolla. One of these focal points is a distant figure moving through the waves, surrounded and contrasted by the light. This person draws the viewers eye deeper into the background of the painting, leading us toward the distant colored sky. Another intriguing focal point is the boy’s big toe, which peeks out of the shadow, highlighted by the sunlight, and points toward the viewer. The boy’s other big toe is highlighted by a bright orange, making that foot seem further back.
The woman’s face in After Bathing is a striking focal point, embodying the light, movement, and power of vibrant paint that is characteristic of Sorolla’s work. He paints her eye with what looks like just two simple brushstrokes, and her face appears to be halfway in the sunlight, halfway shaded by the sheet. Sorolla conveys her facial highlights using bright pinks, oranges, and yellows on top of a darker reddish-brown base. The lines between hair and face are blurred, making it seem as though her hair is being blown around her head, perhaps framing her face and catching the sunlight. Her nose is composed of just a few simple brushstrokes, yet it is beautifully executed and lifelike. This face exemplifies Sorolla’s delicate balance of accuracy and creative expression, pushing the bounds of what feels realistic through color and form. At these bounds, he elicits the epiphany.
After Bathing is flooded by bright sunlight, and Sorolla captures it uncannily well. One can argue that “his rendering of sunlight has reached a point of luminous splendor and beauty beyond which he himself, nor any other man indeed, has ever gone”. Light was Sorolla’s primary inspiration, and Valencia’s scintillating scenes remained his favorites to paint throughout his life. Despite being the Master of Light, Sorolla modestly argues, “We painters, however, can never reproduce sunlight as it really is. I can only approach the truth of it”. Sorolla achieves this truth, clear by the epiphanies experienced with the viewer’s absorption into the meetings of paints, their movements, the secondary focal points, and the subtle hue variations in After Bathing, which are all fueled and amplified by sunlight.
The two main figures shade themselves from the sunlight above, and even these shadows are light-filled. A curious green hue tints the shadows cast by the sheet, coloring the figures’ skin and clothing. This green is strongest in the boy’s stomach and the woman’s neck, which also contain unexpected purples, blues, yellows, and pinks. These vibrant colors draw interest to the subject, and the way the colors relate to and echo each other is epiphanic. The meeting of blues and reds in the boy’s face and the mingling of purples and greens in the woman’s face suggest the vibrancy of human life. This epiphany is what art is about.
The shadow cast by the boat, one of the darkest values in this painting, is a navy blue that beams with color; light still illuminates the darks here. Eccentric purples and browns flow in from the left side – perhaps a kind of reflection from the boat – which Sorolla uses to tie the various colors of the painting together. These purples signal to the purples in the woman’s skirt, which imitate the purples in the sky and the sea. Sorolla thus gravitates away from earthy tones in this painting, instead creating neutrals using brighter colors. The Hispanic Society discusses his color palette, saying, “For works painted in the open air he discarded from his palette brown and black non-transparent colours… He used on his canvases a great variety of blues, violets, yellows, and red. With these and the judicious use of white, he obtained successful and effective harmony of colours, very brilliant and vigorous”. By adding light, in the form of white pigment, Sorolla mixed a diversity of colors that work together to create the luminous scenes he was so passionate about.
Light is also defined as “the natural agent that stimulates sight and makes things visible”. Sorolla’s use of light makes things visible both materially and emotionally. His use of light literally makes his subject matter come to life, making the scenes feel accurate to the fleeting Valencian beach scenes he observes. Sorolla’s use of light also reveals something meaningful and raw about the ephemerality of life. He encapsulates moments that feel personal and quotidian to Valencian culture, but in an obedient way that makes them shine and enchant the viewer.This experience forms an intimate relationship between the viewer and paintings like After Bathing.
Sorolla’s paintings are as much about paint as they are about their subjects. He focuses less on portraying exact forms and more on conveying the vivid essence of the subject, which is enriched and energized by epiphanic light. He enjoyed using an expressive, loose painting style to better capture the vivacious motion of his subjects. For Sorolla, “the play of paint has as much fascination as what is being depicted”. He uses paint with a sense of excitement and joy, letting the paint itself vitalize the painting:
The glimmering light creates an orgiastic feast of hues, with vivid pink, saturated yellow and smouldering greens all vigorously applied. As if racing against the vanishing light, Sorolla dashed the paint directly onto the canvas… he also freed his brushwork to a variety of strokes, either broad or small, which he scrawled, smeared and dabbed onto the canvas. Here colour values are becoming detached from the objects themselves.
Colors are active here – glimmering, orgiastic, smoldering, vanishing – and Sorolla applies them to the canvas heartily – vigorously dashing, scrawling, smearing, and dabbing paint as if he is racing. These layered energies emanate through Sorolla’s paintings. Texture covers both the content of the scene and the surface of the painting through Sorolla’s thick application of paint on the canvas.These nuances build upon each other, conveying light and movement to make the scene dynamic. Painting freely and expressively liberates Sorolla, not confining him to traditional conventions of painting or to specific artistic styles.Sorolla focused on developing his own authentic painting style, not on trying to position his work within any particular artistic movement. Sorolla’s unique light-filled brushstrokes, each with color subtleties and variabilities in thickness, draw out an epiphanic revelation in the viewer.
Joaquín Sorolla – with a passion for light, color, movement, and transience – ventures forth, seeking to share his truth with his viewers. He is the epitome of the artist as a prophet, exploring what it means to be alive and sharing that with his viewers through his paintings. Sorolla says, “I paint because I love painting. For me, painting is an immense pleasure”. Never wavering in his love for painting, Sorolla practiced from youth until death, pushing his artistic bounds and subsequently gifting his mastery of light to others. Sorolla’s love for the act of painting emanates through his work, which is further amplified for his love of the subject matter.
The light and color of Valencia are a part of Sorolla, and he mastered the rendering of fleeting moments like that of After Bathing. Sorolla captures “the sensation, the ephemeral moment of instant light; the texture of the shadows on the pavement… it is a wonder of iridescence and shadows and brushstrokes that generate movement; physical and luminous vibration”. In Sorolla’s paintings, light gives energy to the movement of the subject and the paint itself. The ephemerality of the scene intensifies the emotional quality of the work, evoking the viewer’s epiphany. By evoking an epiphany, Sorolla forms a relationship with his viewer, connecting them through the truth he paints. For Sorolla, being alive is about being engulfed in light and color. He shares his truth with the viewer and draws out the light that is within all of us, connecting artist, viewer, and luminous subjects through epiphanic experiences.
“Approach.” n.d. Accessed December 9, 2022. https://sorollapaintings.com/approach.html.
“Bright Colours, Bold Brushstrokes, and Unexpected Angles | Sorolla: Spanish Master ofLight | National Gallery, London.” n.d. Accessed December 9, 2022. https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/past/sorolla/bright-colours-bold-brushstrokes-and-unexpected-angles.
“Definition of Light.” n.d. Accessed December 9, 2022. https://languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en/.
“Definition of LIGHT.” n.d. Accessed December 9, 2022. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/light.
HarvardUniversity, dir. 2013. Jennifer Roberts -- HILT 2013 Conference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnQVT_p6pxg.
Muñoz,Abelardo. 1998. Joaquín Sorolla: Viajero a La Luz. Colección Biografía 26. Valencia: Institució Alfons el Magnànim.
Nemerov, Alexander. “Chapter Seven. Epiphany.” Art History 1B Lecture, StanfordUniversity, CA, October 17, 2022.
Nemerov, Alexander. “Chapter Three. The Call.” Art History 1B Lecture, StanfordUniversity, CA, October 3, 2022.
Nemerov, Alexander. “Chapter Twenty. Painter.” Art History 1B Lecture, StanfordUniversity, CA, December 7, 2022.
Pons-Sorolla, Blanca, and Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida. 2005. Joaquín Sorolla. Edited by Edmund Peel. 1. publ. London: Wilson.
Schofield, Linda, Gabriele Finaldi, Javier Barón, Véronique Gerard Powell, Oliver Tostmann, Christopher Riopelle, Blanca Pons-Sorolla, et al., eds. 2019. Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light. London: National Gallery Company.
Sorolla– Hispanic Notes & Monographs: Essays, Studied, and Brief Biographies Issued by the Hispanic Society of America. 1926. Vol. 1. 5 vols. Portraits. Cornell Publications Printing Co.
“Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light | Past Exhibitions | National Gallery, London.” n.d. Accessed December 9, 2022. https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/past/sorolla.
