Joaquín Sorolla (1863-1923) – pronounced Soroya – is not a name on many people’s lips. Insanely popular in his day, to the extent that New Yorkers queued in heavy snow to view his large and florid paintings, he is almost forgotten in ours. Or at least he might be, if not for his virtuoso effects and his singular reputation as the master of Spanish sunlight.
Sun seen through the rising wave, the billowing sail and the gauzy muslin veil. Sun dancing across spring lawns, igniting summer blossoms and striking the golden beaches of his native Valencia. Sun reflected in cool ponds, flickering between the trees in Sorolla’s sumptuous garden, and sparkling through the fountains of the mighty Alhambra. It is hardly possible to stand before these enormous canvases, thick with paint, without feeling at least something of their appeal, a combination of the obvious and comfortable relish in their making, and the irreducible beauty of sunlight itself. Sorolla is, in every respect, a sunny painter.
He tried not to be. At the National Gallery there are determined attempts to look on the dark side. A young fisherman lies fatally wounded among that day’s catch in a moralising tableau from 1894 titled And They Still Say Fish Is Expensive! Ill and crippled boys are taken on a trip to the seaside, almost literally bathed in pathos. A young woman charged with killing her child sits exhausted and forlorn in handcuffs.
But Sorolla was not made for sorrow. In no time he’s back putting on the flash and dash of sunshine skittering across the shallows where several naked boys shine wet as his oleaginous paint. Or getting down the amazingly complex performance of sunlight passing through the staves of a fence on a voluminous creased sail mended by half a dozen girls.
Even his scene of labourers in a raisin-packing factory veers away from the social concerns it seemed about to raise – figures jammed together in sweltering darkness – in favour of a bright yellow sunbeam that resembles nothing so much as a two by four plank, laid diagonally across the picture.
Sorolla was a child prodigy. Orphaned at two, he was raised by an aunt who recognised his gifts, bought him pencils and paints and got him work as a lighting assistant to a local photographer at a very early age. A breezy portrait of his beloved wife, Clotilde, from 1906, shows her focusing a brand new camera at the beach, and many of Sorolla’s paintings are lit and composed like snapshots.
This effect is abetted by his high-chrome version of impressionism. This art looks fast, and Sorolla was known to be quick, not least because he was often working outdoors; but there is a practised look to every picture. The strokes are learned, a calculated anthology of hooks, dabs, arcs and gliding swipes, sometimes as formulaic as his palette, which uses the same blues for shadow, the same range of whites for fresh linen and sunlight.
Sorolla’s diligence as a student shows itself in homages to other artists that verge on plagiarism. His portrait of a Spanish society beauty looks so like a misty-eyed Lawrence Alma-Tadema that even the sitter remarked upon it. His painting of a contemporary art historian more than imitates John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Henry James. And worst among his weak pastiches of Goya and Velázquez is a baby-pink update of the Rokeby Venus – he travelled all the way to Yorkshire to see the original – in which Velázquez is awkwardly reprised in what looks like lipstick and greasepaint.
All these influences are candidly acknowledged in this show; nor do the curators attempt to overstate Sorolla’s gifts. They themselves allude to the fact that Degas, after staring intently at every painting in one of the Spaniard’s overstuffed shows – Sorolla was predictably prolific – “left without saying a word”.
His painting is all effects, and concerned with effects. He is interested in the glint of patent leather, the transparency of gauze over cotton, above all the play of light on all sorts of surfaces. Occasionally this results in some real originality, as in his portrait of Clotilde and their newborn daughter as two dark heads adrift in an oceanic white bed, new stars of the sea. But generally it leads to a kind of luxury painting, richly calorific, joyously upbeat and too often glib.
The shows ends with something braver, however, in which Sorolla rises above his own success. The figures of his wife and daughters, dressed in white, sprawl beneath a tree in the noonday heat. The grass is electric green, the light blinding, and Sorolla’s brushstrokes – spontaneous, free, reaching beyond impressionism and into dazzling abstraction – cease to draw attention to themselves.
Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light is at the National Gallery, London, until 7 July
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