Two Spanish Painters
Modern art, particularly American art, owes much to Velasquez and something to Goya, and modern painters have been prompt to acknowledge their indebtedness. But there has been a prevailing impression that with Goya's rich and unique achievement Spanish art stopped in its own country so completely as to be incapable of revival. The impression was disturbed in this country by the appearance in the galleries of the Hispanic Museum in New York, and also in Buffalo and in Boston, of the work of two modern Spaniards, one a painter who demonstrated by his methods and choice of subjects that the old Spanish traditions and ideals had not been forgotten, the other a singularly isolated individual who illumined for us a side of Spanish life which art previously had ignored. Both spoke a racy idiom and conveyed a sense of quickened vitality by freedom of gesture, unhackneyed arrangement, intensity of color, reality of type, yet in their influence upon the public they were as far as might be asunder.
Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida was born at Valencia, Spain, in 1863, and began seriously to study art at the age of fifteen. He studied at the Academy of his birthplace for several years and won there a scholarship entitling him to a period of study in Italy. He visited Paris also, where he was profoundly impressed, it is said, by two exhibitions in the French capital, one of the work of Bastien LePage, the other of the work of the German Menzel. The modern note is clearly felt in all his later painting, but certainly not the influence of either Bastien LePage or Menzel. The painter to whom he bears the most marked resemblance is Botticelli. The spiritual languor, the melancholy sentiment, the mystical tendency, the curiosity and interest in the unseen which are important characteristics of the Florentine who read his Dante to such good purpose do not appear in the work of this frank and lusty Valencian, but where else in modern painting do we find the gracile forms, the supple muscles, the buoyancy of carriage, the light impetuosity of movement, and the draperies blown into the shapes of wings and sails, which meet us here as in the pagan compositions of Botticelli?
If we glance at Sorolla's young girls and young boys racing along the hot beach, or his bathers exulting in their "water joy," we recall at the same moment the "Primavera" with its swift-stepping nymphs, the wind gods in the "Birth of Venus," or the "Judith" with her maid moving rapidly along a flower-strewn path. This joy of motion and this continual suggestion of youth and vitality form the link that binds together the so dissimilar ideals of the old and the modern master. Sorolla's inspiration is by far the simpler. His art reflects the brilliant sunshine of the Mediterranean coast, the tonic quality of the fresh air, and the unconventionality of life by the sea. All his people use natural gestures and express in their activity the untrammeled energy of primitive life. In looking at these children, and there is hardly a figure that has not the naïveté of childhood, we think less of the individuals portrayed than of the outdoor freshness of which they are a part. They are much more spirits of nature than the dryads and nereids and mermaids conceived by the Germans to express in symbol the natural forces. Nothing suggests the use of models, all has the look of spontaneity as though the artist had made his notes in passing, without the slightest regard to producing a picture, with only the idea of reproducing life. Life, however, appears in his canvases in a sufficiently decorative form, although not in the carefully considered patterns of those artists with whom the decorative instinct is supreme.
Observe, for example, the painting entitled "Sea Idyl." Two children are stretched on the beach, their bright bodies wet and glistening and casting blue shadows on the sands. They are lying so close to the water's edge that the waves lap over them, the boy's skin shines like polished marble under the wet film just passing across it, and the girl's drenched garments cling with sharp chiseled folds to the form beneath like the draperies of some young Greek goddess just risen from the sea. The insolence of laughing eyes, the idle fumbling of young hands in the wet sand, the tingling life in the clean-cut limbs, the buoyancy of the waves that lift them slightly and hold them above the earth,—all are seen with unwearied eyes, and reproduced with energy.
The management of the pigment in this picture as in many of the others can be called neither learned nor subtle. Apparently the artist had in mind two intentions, the one to represent motion, the other to represent light, and he set about his task in the simplest way possible, with such simplicity, indeed, that the extraordinary character of the result would easily be missed by a pedant. It has not been missed by the public, who have entered with enthusiasm into the painter's mood, perceived the originality of his vision and the joyousness of his art, and have radiated their own appreciation of this vitalized, healthful world of happy people until they have increased the distrust of the pedant for an art so helplessly popular.