Los Pequeños Cuadros... Fernando, a good friend of mine visited the Museo Sorolla in Madrid back in 2014, and while he was there he photographed some of the hundreds of color sketches Sorolla executed to keep his hand busy. (I just found the jpgs Fernando sent to me four years ago.) The little paintings you will find below are now hung behind a large glass case in Sorolla's main working studio and many of them have never appeared in print. Some were clearly experimental explorations, and some of them were preparatory designs for larger work you can recognize. In any case, to spend time with these little goodies is revelatory and worth a trip to the Sorolla Museum alone.
And no, I don't have titles for any of them. In truth, I doubt there were titles since it would be unlikely that Sorolla thought of them as finished work. I remember most of these colorful sketches being thickly painted on cheap brown chip board, and sized quite modestly between 4 x 5 to 8 x 12 inches or so, with a few of them being a bit larger.
Okay, mental note to self: Start doing quick little studies!...
Enjoy!...
(click images to enlarge)
7 reader comments:
OK, Wow! Just...wow.
That pretty much just says it all, Tim. And this is just a small number of the studies inside the cabinet...
Those water studies! What powerful observational skills he had, amazing.
They just take my breath away. Thank you for sharing with us all.
Thanks for posting these! I remember so clearly visiting Sorolla's house back in 1986--we had been living in Germany and had planned to vacation all over Europe before coming back to the US--just at the moment when Chernobyl blew up. Spain was the only country not hit with fall-out so that's where we went and Sorolla's house was my main destination. I remember walking from one room to the next in the house, down a couple of steps and seeing the very large painting of the women lying in the grass on the wall opposite those steps. It was completely amazing. Now I'm going to have to go back through my photos from that time and see what I brought home. I hope you will post all the photos you received--I just copied the ones you posted to my Sorolla folder! Here's a link to the "Eight Essays on Joaquin Sorolla": https://archive.org/details/eightessaysonjo00hunegoog
Thank you Karen. I'll read the essays at the first opportunity.
TJK
Beautiful! Each and everyone! Thanks so much for posting these and introducing me to this wonderful artists!
Post a Comment