Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida

(Spanish, 1863-1923)

Un Hebreo

Footnotes

Provenance
Private collection, Spain

Exhibited
Madrid, 1901, Exposición-subasta a beneficio de la Asociación de la Prensa de Madrid at the galleries of the Blanco y Negro, where sold.

Literature
'La Ilustracion Espanola y Americana', 30 January, 1914
Emiliano Aquilera, Joaquin Sorolla (Los Grandes Artistas Contemporaneos), Barcelona, 1932, illustrated in black and white, p.51
Bernardino de Pantorba, La Vida Y La Obra de Joaquin Sorolla, Madrid, second edition, 1970, no.1355, p.180.

To be sold with a certificate of authenticity, issued by Blanca Pons-Sorolla, issued 31 March 2008. The work is included in Blanca Pons-Sorolla's catalogue under inventory number BPS 920.

This charming and striking work, by one of Spain's foremost painters, shares the ease and spontaneity of many of the artist's more well-known single figure portraits. By the time the work was painted in 1898, Sorolla enjoyed an International reputation, his work regularly exhibited across Europe.

During this year, Sorolla completed a number of very important works. He had established a studio in Madrid, where he worked for the first few months of the year. He then spent June painting in the coastal town of Jávea in Alicante, where he completed two spectacular landscapes, The Small Cove, Jávea and The Carob Tree, before joining his family in Valencia, where he worked for the rest of the summer. In Valencia, Sorolla completed Eating on the Boat, one of his most important early works. The rest of the year was spent back in his studio in Madrid. (1)

Of the works submitted for exhibition this year were Fisherman gathering the nets (1896) and Valencia Beach which he submitted to the Paris Salon, as well as Sewing the Sail (1896) which continued its international tour with exhibition in Vienna, and The White Slave Trade (1895) which Sorolla sent to Buenos Aires.

The present lot makes an interesting comparison with Sorolla's 1894 work, The novelist Benito Pérez Galdós, which is one of the artist's first major portraits of a sitter outside of the artist's family. In both works, the artist has chosen a landscape composition for his portrait, not a common technique in the tradition of Spanish portraiture, but one that served the artist to great effect in many of his major portraits, such as Santiago Ramón Y Cajal (1906), The Photographer Antonio García in his Laboratory (1908) and Louis Comfort Tiffany (1911). In both the present lot and in the portrait of Galdós, the background is divided, with a dark, undefined area to the right hand side, contrasting with a more decorative detail to the background of the left hand side. In both compositions, the sitter is positioned between these contrasting backgrounds, his left hand wrapped around a walking stick.

As José Lius Diez comments, Sorolla's early portraits reveal 'the painter's youthful preference for abrupt light contrast, which causes the figure to stand out sharply against a deeply darkened backdrop'. While the artist's later portraits tend to use a lighter palate, these earlier works show how Sorolla is 'rooted in a major Spanish tradition of portrait-painting that was to be absolutely decisive in his subsequent output in the genre...his roots dig deeply into the baroque painting of his own Valencian school, in a clear echo of the work of Jusepe de Ribera'.(2)

Born in Valencia in 1863, Sorolla's early training included a close study of Velasquez's works in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, before furthering his education in Rome under the tutelage of such Spanish masters as Francisco Pradilla (1848-1921), Jose Villegas (1848-1921) and Emilio Sala (1850-1910). Sorolla also travelled to Paris where he was exposed to the works of Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884) and Adolf von Menzel (1815-1905), whose Naturalistic style was to have a great influence on his own work. Later in his career, Sorolla visited America, and in 1911 he began work on his most ambitious undertaking, a series of fourteen huge murals entitled Visions of Spain which adorn the Sorolla room at the Hispanic Society of America.

Sorolla divided his time between a studio in Madrid and his family home of Valencia, producing a prodigious output of paintings, and gaining international recognition. His work is represented in Museums throughout the world.

Although listed in Bernadino de Pantorba's 1953 catalogue on Sorolla, Un Hebreo was only known through black and white images, and has not been offered for sale since it was sold at an exhibition in Madrid in 1901, making its appearance at auction extremely exciting. The signature remnant in the lower left corner suggests that the artist may have cut and reduced the work to alter the composition, before signing and dating it in its present position.

(1) José Lius Diez and Javier Bardón, Joachin Sorolla 1863-1923, Madrid, 2009, pp.489-90
(2) Ibid, pp. 233-35