Artists can be trained, but they are formed by their earliest impressions: a child of five may not be able to draw like a master but he can see better and more intensely. The light of Valencia was burnt into Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida’s mental retina and he could not get it out of his mind: ‘I live here like an orange tree surrounded by heaters,’ he told an interviewer in Madrid in 1913.
Never a studio painter, he worked best under the lamp of his native sun and returned to Valencia from wherever he was living every summer to set up his easel on the beach. His ambition was to develop ‘a kind of painting that is frank, the sort of painting that interprets Nature as it really is’, and he began to achieve it in the 1890s in paintings like ‘The Return from Fishing’ (1894).
As in the title of the National Gallery’s new exhibition, Sorolla is often called a master of light when, technically speaking, he is a master of white.
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