The impressionists we celebrate today as global brand names, such as Monet, Renoir and Degas, struggled until late in life to find dealers and collectors. By contrast, their contemporaries known as “masters of the loaded brush” were feted by the elites of the late 19th and early 20th century.
Tastes — and critical estimations — change, of course. With the exception of John Singer Sargent, those once-renowned painters — Anders Zorn, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, Jacques-Émile Blanche and Giacomo Boldini — languished in reputation for many decades.
The Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University is doing its part to correct that imbalance, presenting a major exhibition by the Spanish master Sorolla that focuses on his success in America.
Born in 1863, Sorolla was an orphan and was raised by relatives. His utter facility as a painter was recognized early and, by the time he was 30, a painting by him won a medal of honor at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, or the great Chicago World’s Fair.
This started a career so successful that even Sargent was jealous. By the time Sorolla died at 60 in 1923, large exhibitions of his work had been held in London, Paris and Madrid. His U.S. exhibitions broke attendance records in New York — 160,000 people in less than a month in 1909 — and went on to Boston and Buffalo, N.Y., and, in another form in 1911, to Chicago and St. Louis.
Hundreds of his most important paintings were purchased from those exhibitions by American private and public collections. Sorolla’s success was such that he taught at the Art Institute of Chicago, painted President William Howard Taft in the White House and received commissions for portraits of the wife of J. Pierpont Morgan, a U.S. secretary of state, tastemaker Louis Comfort Tiffany and many other grandees.
Yet, unlike Sargent, who was known in America predominantly as a portraitist, Sorolla was understood to be a well-rounded artist whose landscapes, genre scenes and even historical paintings had a fluency and immediacy that even the impressionists could envy.
The Meadows Museum presents the first large-scale exhibition to re-create Sorolla’s remarkable reign in America. Sadly, it can only hint at his greatest achievement, the immense murals for the Hispanic Society in New York, The Provinces of Spain (1912-19), which, though recently cleaned and reinstalled, are too large to be shipped.
Even without them, more than 150 works occupy all but one gallery on the second floor of the Meadows Museum to form the largest and most ambitious exhibition yet mounted by the museum. “Sorolla and America” is the brainchild of its director, Mark Roglán, an expert in 19th-century art.
He approached Sorolla’s great-granddaughter, the Spanish art historian Blanca Pons-Sorolla, to collaborate with him. Their exhibition begins with two prizewinning paintings, ¡Otra Margarita! (Another Marguerite!), which won the artist’s first medal in Chicago, and Sad Inheritance, an immense masterpiece that took the grand prize in Paris at the International Exhibition of 1900 and was purchased by an American.
These paintings represent the lower classes; the first a young working-class woman arrested for infanticide and the latter a priest taking little boys with polio to the beach. Each wrenches our emotions with their combination of pictorial bravado and human tragedy.
From there, the exhibition is divided into parts, the larger one of which deals with Sorolla’s relationship with his greatest single patron, Archer M. Huntington, the railroad heir, who oversaw his career in America and whose private collection of Sorollas was the finest in the world.
The 1909 exhibition of Sorolla at Huntington’s Hispanic Society in 1909 contained 356 works, of which at least 200 were sold. It contained two portraits of the king and queen of Spain, both of whom were present at the opening. These portraits are in the current exhibition and shown, along with 28 other paintings, for the first time in America since 1909.
In Sorolla’s portraits gathered in two large galleries, his heads and hands and poses, even when conventional, are so well-observed and his skill at the elusive likeness so secure that he could embody complex emotions. Those portraits suggest sadness, mirth, suspicion or melancholy, which, in most society portraits, is merely an effect of placid, strained refinement.
He was equally adept at painting men and women, adults and children, the latter perhaps because he painted his own children — two daughters and a son — often and in contexts far from conventionally posed portraits.
Sorolla’s beach scenes from Valencia, San Sebastián and Biarritz fill an entire gallery with white dresses, immense flowing towels, wind-filled sails and slippery bodies that glisten in the sun, sometimes half-submerged in warm, sparkling water.
Perhaps the highlight of this room is The White Boat of 1905. Another canvas, from 1908, Running Along the Beach, is shown alone in a small gallery surrounded by six preparatory drawings, which show how Sorolla rehearsed his gestures and poses before commencing to paint them with such confident élan. These drawings are as fine as any figure drawings of the late 19th century and add a new dimension to our understanding of the artist.
One corridor gallery is filled with Sorolla’s little-known views of New York painted in gouache from his window at the Savoy Hotel in 1909 and 1911. When compared to contemporary paintings of New York by American Childe Hassam, they have a confidence, sophistication and immediacy unique to Sorolla.
Then there are his doodles of American diners on the backs of the printed menus from hotels in Chicago and New York that, together with the menus themselves, present a bygone era of American elegance.
Other galleries include his wonderfully fresh landscape paintings, many featuring the great Moorish gardens of southern Spain and the royal gardens of La Granja. There are views of Toledo and a series of pictures of Spain owned by Sorolla’s other major American patron, Thomas Fortune Ryan.
Few Americans can be anything other than moved when seeing the 1910 painting of Christopher Columbus leaving Palos, Spain, commissioned by Ryan. The painting, which normally hangs in the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Va., should be an icon in the visual history of America. It represents an aging, wizened, white-haired man — not the heroic, youthful Columbus of lore. He stands alone on his ship, sails billowing in the wind behind him, looking toward an unknown future.
Shown for the first time with all nine painted studies for it, it is not directly related to any of them. Today, we can be with Sorolla as he struggled to place the figure with various props and poses until he felt ready, with all the studies around him, each slightly different from the other, none precisely like the final canvas, to paint Columbus himself.
Rick Brettell holds the Margaret McDermott Distinguished Chair at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Plan your life
“Sorolla and America” continues through April 19 at the Meadows Museum, 5900 Bishop Blvd., Dallas. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays and 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays. $10; discounts apply. 214-768-2516. meadowsmuseumdallas.org.