El first catalogue raisonnĂ© of paintings by JoaquĂn Sorolla It's now a reality. After decades of work in archives, public collections, and private funds, the researcher Blanca Pons Sorolla, great-granddaughter of the Valencian painter, has presented at the Museo del Prado the initial volume of a work destined to become an essential reference for understanding the master of light.
This first volume "Sorolla. Catalogue raisonné of paintings (1876-1894)" brings together the production of the artist's formative years and early successes, from his 13 years until the moment he claims to have found his path as a painter. This is the most significant period. early and unknown of his career, with numerous works that are now being published and studied for the first time.
A monumental project to organize 4.200 paintings
Far from being just another book about the painter, this catalogue raisonné is the start of a monumental project: to fix in four volumes the entirety of Sorolla's pictorial production, estimated in approximately 4.200 works The plan includes oil paintings, watercolors, and gouaches, distributed among museums and collections worldwide. It also envisions approximately 4.500 illustrations that document and accompany each piece.
The volume that has just been published is dedicated to the period 1876-1894 and pick up 1.073 works of different techniques, arranged chronologically and accompanied by technical sheets carefully reviewed. Many of these pieces, especially those made during his apprenticeship and stays in ItalyThey were difficult to locate and remained unpublished or barely studied.
The idea is that the next three volumes will complete the artist's life arc: the second will cover 1895-1903, With a 1.040 paintingsThe third, the years 1904-1911, with about 1.200 works linked to its major international exhibitions; and the fourth will focus on the period 1912-1920, with around NOTE 1.000Until the stroke which definitively separated him from painting at the age of 57.
According to the publisher's forecast, El Viso EditionsThe remaining three volumes will be released over the next few years and will provide a complete, ordered and scientifically validated corpus of all of Sorolla's paintings. They will be published in two independent versions, in Spanish and English, with initial print runs of 1.000 copies per language.
The first volume: from teenager to painter who finds his way
The volume presented at the Prado focuses on the first 18 years of career of the painter, from his beginnings in Valencia until 1894, a key year in which, according to the family itself, Sorolla find your voice as an artist. Among the works included is the famous "Return from fishing", with which she won first prize at the Paris Salon and which is now part of the collections of Orsay Museum from the French capital.
In this early stage the painter goes from being a young student with barely 13 years to a creator fully aware of his resources. The catalogue shows how he is consolidating his love for drawingthe mastery of color and, above all, that obsession with light which will mark his mature work. As Pons-Sorolla emphasizes, here we see the «Sorolla's lesser-known work", with exercises, essays and changes of course that help to understand the later teacher.
The book includes oils, watercolors and gouaches, all of them reproduced in color photograph whenever possible. Only in cases where no other documentation exists are historical images used. black and whiteA significant portion of the works are being revealed for the first time now, following a complex process of location in private collections and scattered funds.
This volume also engages with the so-called "volume 0", the catalogue raisonné of the paintings preserved in the Sorolla MuseumPublished in 2019 and focused on the approximately NOTE 1.300 of the Madrid house-museum. That work served as a basis and testing ground for the methodology that is now applied to all of the artist's production.
Four decades of research by Blanca Pons-Sorolla
Behind the catalog there are almost forty years of work by Blanca Pons-Sorolla. Her relationship with the project does not stem from a recent commission, but from a vital link with the work of her great-grandfather. From childhood, her grandparents—also painters—and her father taught her to look at the painting She was already familiarizing herself with the rooms of the Sorolla Museum, which she herself still felt was the family home.
In the early 80s, Pons-Sorolla began to systematically investigate the life and work of the artist, first alongside his father, Francisco Pons-Sorollaand later on his own, when he definitively passed the torch to him in the 1990s. The reading of epistolary The relationship between JoaquĂn Sorolla and his wife, Clotilde, was one of the decisive moments: those letters, as he has acknowledged, led him to dedicate your life to the painter's studio.
From there he launched a broad cataloging processGathering documentation, old photographs, exhibition references, and bibliography. With the help of a team of documentary filmmakers and specialistsShe created a specific database to record each work, its variants, provenances, and changes in attribution. The author does not hesitate to describe this work as "titanic", both because of the amount of material and the need to check each piece of data.
During those years other milestones linked to Sorolla also appeared: publications of biographiesletter editions and lettersand numerous exhibitions in Spanish and foreign museums. Among them, the exhibitions organized at the National Gallery of London or the one dedicated to Sorolla in the Royal Collections, as well as acts related to the centenary of his death held in 2023, where research and dissemination projects multiplied.
The author emphasizes that even during the pandemic He used the time to make progress on the information sheets for three of the four volumes, demonstrating the extent to which the project is linked to his daily life. In fact, he confesses that his personal aspiration is See all published volumes along with the collaborators and friends who have accompanied her on this long journey.
Content and methodology of the catalogue raisonné
Beyond the reproduction of the paintings, each volume of the catalogue is conceived as a Work tool For specialists, museums, collectors, and art lovers. The first volume, of around 450-480 pages and a good thousand illustrations; it does not merely list the pieces, but inserts them into a structure biographical and chronological very precise.
Each section incorporates a detailed bio-chronology Sorolla's work during the corresponding years, where personal events, travels, commissions, and accolades intersect. Added to this is a updated bibliography, the record of the exhibitions which have included the works and one methodological introduction which explains the criteria followed for cataloging, dating and equivalences with previous inventories.
One of the most useful sections is the one about the equivalence tablesThese links current catalog numbers to other reference systems used in the past, which is especially valuable for researchers consulting old archives or auction catalogs. They also document the provenances, changes of ownership and, when known, the exhibition route of each piece.
The reproductions have been made with color photograph high quality in virtually all cases, except for a few works for which only graphic evidence exists in black and whiteThe hardcover, large-format edition seeks to balance the character scientific The book has a presentation suitable for the general public interested in art. The starting price for the first volume is around 120 Euros, in line with other reference publications of this type.
According to the publishers, the four-volume set will bring together around 4.200 paintings, more of 4.500 images, more of 300 bibliographic references and near 400 exhibition mentionsThe stated objective is to establish a open corpussince works continue to appear in private collections that, over time, will be able to be added to this general map of Sorolla's production.
Institutions involved and international projection
The presentation of the catalogue in the Museo del Prado This is no coincidence. Sorolla himself frequented his studios as a young man to copy works by VelĂ¡zquez and other masters, and the museum preserves it today 23 paintings by the artist. The head of 19th-century painting conservation, Javier BaronHe was in charge of highlighting the scientific rigor of the work of Pons-Sorolla and the importance of having a tool that rigorously organizes the painter's production.
Also participating in the event were Gonzalo Saavedra, director of El Viso Editions; Enrique Varela, Director of Sorolla Museum; and representatives of the Meadows Museum from Dallas and from Custard Institute for Spanish Art and Cultureas the Amanda Dotseth y Greg WardenThey all emphasized the character ambitious and necessary of the project, both for Spain and for the international context.
Saavedra defined the catalog as a kind of "orchestra" in which it is necessary to coordinate a multitude of "instruments"—researchers, photographers, editors, translators, institutions—so that the result sounds well-tuned. From the publishing house, specializing in books on art, photography, architecture and designThe experience gained in similar projects and the willingness to maintain high quality standards both in content and form.
El Sorolla Museum, currently closed to the public for works expansion and rehabilitation of the house-museum, has played a key role. Its director, Enrique Varela, believes that this catalogue arrives at a particularly opportune moment, in line with the commemorative events of centenary of death of the artist and the debate about how update reading of his work for new generations.
The project has the financial support of the Sorolla Museum Foundation, The Embassy of Spain in the United States and entities such as KHR McNeely Family Foundation, through the Custard Institute and the Meadows MuseumThe goal is for the bilingual edition to have a wide international distribution that reaches Europe, the United States, and other countries interested in Spanish art.
Institutions such as Meadows Museum They recall that Sorolla has been part of their collections since the mid-20th century and that projects of this nature fit with their mission to research, promote and share Spanish art. It is emphasized that this catalogue raisonné will, from now on, be the reference tool for any study about the painter.
The Master of Light: Artistic Context and Legacy
The catalogue raisonnĂ© not only compiles canvases, but also helps to better situate JoaquĂn Sorolla (1863-1923) in the European art scene of his time. Born in Valencia, the painter trained in the San Carlos School of Fine Arts and very soon he stood out for his technical skill and his ability to grasp the Mediterranean lightAt 15, he was already immersed in an environment of teachers and mentors who shaped his development.
Key figures in its first stage include Baltasar Perales, Luis Santonja y Antonio GarcĂaThe latter was a photographer and the painter's future father-in-law. Through them, Sorolla reinforced his taste for the rigorous drawing and through direct observation of reality. Obtaining a scholarship as a pensioner in Rome His travels through Italy and France allowed him to see firsthand both classical tradition and the most current movements.
In Paris he had the opportunity to see the work of artists such as Claude Monet and other Impressionists, who influenced his understanding of outdoor paintingHowever, Pons-Sorolla insists that his major role models It was the Spanish teachers, especially VelĂ¡zquez y GoyaFrom the first he gained an interest in the chiaroscuro and the naturalness in the representation; from the second, the ability to combine everyday scenes with a strong expressive charge.
Over time, Sorolla established himself as a tireless painteralways willing to experiment with new solutions to capture movement, atmosphere, and reflections on water or sand. Pons-Sorolla recalls that "inspiration always surprised him with the paintbrushes in hand"," a phrase that is repeated time and again in speeches about the artist to underline his hardworking and methodical character.
His major international successes, such as the awards he received in the World's Fair in Paris in 1900 or National Fine Arts Exhibition of MadridThese recognitions marked a turning point. They allowed him to close a chapter focused on winning awards and dedicate himself to what he felt he should do as a painter: develop his own language, freer and more modern, which ultimately placed him among the great names of the modern European painting.
The catalogue raisonnĂ© also covers, in its later volumes, the era of the great portraits —of figures like Benito PĂ©rez GaldĂ³s, Antonio Machado, RamĂ³n y Cajal o Vicente Blasco IbĂ¡Ă±ez— and the ambitious panel cycle for the Hispanic Society from New York, known as "Vision of Spain", one of the most important decorative companies of the time.
In the last years of his life, before the stroke that forced him to stop painting in 1920Sorolla continued working in gardens, seascapes and genre scenesMany of them were set in her own home and Andalusian gardens. According to her great-granddaughter, this "outpouring of feeling" and her constant effort to translate what she saw into paintings exhausted her health, but left a legacy of a exceptional fertility.
The publication of this first volume of the catalogue raisonné is therefore much more than a publishing milestone. It represents the partial culmination of a collective effort which has brought together museums, foundations, experts and families around a common goal: organize, document and make accessible The work of one of the great masters of Spanish painting. With the following volumes on the way, a new stage opens for the study of Sorolla, in which it will be easier to follow the evolution of his vision, verify the coherence of his career, and more accurately assess his place in the history of European art.
