Travelling to paint. Sorolla in Saint Sebastian

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Joaquín Sorolla travels again to San Sebastián as part of the commemorative activities for the centenary of his death in Cercedilla (Madrid) on August 10. In order to exhibit a group of works by the great Valencian painter in the places where they were made, the Sorolla Museum and the Sorolla Museum Foundation have programmed a series of exhibitions entitled "Sorolla. Traveling to paint". The Donostia exhibition, organized in collaboration with the San Telmo Museum, is the first of this project. Its purpose is that the works can be seen in the same place where they were created.

• From 17th June to 15th Octobre, 2023
• From Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00-20:00
• Tickets

"The Sorolla Museum and the Sorolla Museum Foundation present the exhibition project Travelling to Paint within the framework of the official programme marking the centenary of the death of Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863-1923). It is an original proposal which will take the master of light’s works to the main places in where they were created in the open air or au plein air. A well-deserved tribute to his prolific summer campaigns, as befits Sorolla the tireless traveller. With the collaboration of San Telmo Museum, the project’s first destination is “Travelling to Paint. Sorolla in San Sebastian”, a city with which the painter became irrevocably linked, as an ideal place to escape and paint, while still enjoying a cool climate and busy social life.

For more than thirty years (1889 to 1921), the painter spent sporadic summers in San Sebastián, almost always in the company of his family: his wife Clotilde and their children María, Joaquín and Elena. His paintings captured the modernity of San Sebastián like no one else’s, by means of his luminous and vivid palette, and they defined the visual ideology that is still linked with the city today.

We can establish two powerful reasons why Sorolla chose San Sebastián. These provide a structure for the exhibition. The first is merely pictorial; the changing light of the Cantabrian Sea. Sorolla engaged in commendable introspection by muting the tones of his palette to a softer and more nuanced range, more in keeping with the changeable northern climate. Gathered together for the first time, San Telmo Museum presents a careful selection of his renowned series of views of El rompeolas with Mount Ulía, or San Sebastián inland landscapes, the main settings that captivated the painter. Secondly, Sorolla found the city an ideal place to paint his small-scale colour notes and thus act as a wise social chronicler, as he did throughout his entire career. The painter’s rich clientele and his wide group of friends met in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of its wide avenues and La Concha beach. They were all captivated by the new concept of open-air leisure introduced by the main up and coming members of the hygienist movement.

Conceived as final works in themselves, they are very valuable due to their authenticity and they constitute the very essence of his painting because they are the most direct medium he possessed to capture reality."

Acacia Sánchez Domínguez, exhibition curator