Joaquín Sorolla

Hello, my name is Joaquín Sorolla, and I am remembered as a painter who loved to capture the bright, beautiful sunshine of my home country, Spain. I was born in a city called Valencia on February 27th, 1863. My life started with a very sad event. When I was only two years old, in 1865, both of my parents became sick and passed away. It was a difficult time, but my kind aunt and uncle took my sister and me into their home and raised us as their own. From a very young age, I knew I wanted to be an artist. I was always drawing and painting. I especially loved visiting the beaches of Valencia, where the sun made the sand and water sparkle. I would spend hours trying to capture that light on my paper. When I was a teenager, my aunt and uncle saw how much I loved art and supported my dream by helping me begin my formal art studies.

My greatest passion was painting outdoors, which artists call painting ‘en plein air.’ I wanted my paintings to feel as real and bright as the world I saw, so I set up my canvas right on the beach or in the countryside. This style of capturing the brilliant light of the sun became known as Luminism. My life became even brighter when I married my wonderful wife, Clotilde García del Castillo, in 1888. She and our children became my favorite subjects to paint. You can see them in many of my works, often enjoying a sunny day by the sea. I became known for my paintings of children laughing and playing in the waves and of fishermen hard at work with their boats and nets. A very important moment in my career happened in 1900. I entered one of my paintings, called 'Sad Inheritance,' into a huge art show in Paris called the Exposition Universelle. It won the highest prize, the Grand Prix. After that, people all over the world knew my name and my art.

In 1911, I was given the biggest and most important project of my entire life. The Hispanic Society of America, located in New York City, asked me to create a series of enormous paintings that would show the true spirit of Spain. This amazing collection was called 'Vision of Spain.' To complete this huge task, I spent years traveling all across my country, from 1912 until 1919. I visited big cities and small villages to see how people lived. I wanted to capture everything that made Spain special—the colorful festivals, the traditional clothing people wore, and the everyday work they did. It was a long and challenging journey, but I was determined to show the world the beauty and diversity of my homeland. I painted fourteen massive murals in total, each one a window into a different region of Spain. It was my love letter to my country, painted with light and color.

My busy career as a painter came to a sudden stop in 1920. I was working in the garden of my home in Madrid when I suffered a stroke, which is a serious illness that affects the brain. I was no longer able to paint after that day, but I lived for three more years, surrounded by my family. I lived to be 60 years old. Today, if you visit Madrid, you can walk through the very house where I lived and worked. It has been turned into the Sorolla Museum, and it is filled with the paintings I created throughout my life. People remember me as the 'master of light' because I spent my life trying to capture the sunny, happy, and vibrant moments of life in Spain on my canvases for everyone to see.