Coinciding with the 100th anniversary of his death, Correos dedicates a stamp to the painter Joaquín Sorolla.
Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida is one of the great masters of Spanish painting of the late XIX and early XX century. He was the most internationally renowned Spanish painter of his time, and one of the most important figures in the history of Spanish art as a whole.
Sorolla was born in Valencia in 1863, being orphaned at the age of two. From an early age he demonstrated his love and talent for drawing and painting, first attending the evening drawing classes of the sculptor Cayetano Capuz, and later training at the prestigious School of Fine Arts of San Carlos. He completed his instruction with stays in Madrid, Rome and Paris. In Madrid he made successive visits to the Prado Museum, where he was able to learn and copy works by the great masters. In Rome he had the opportunity to study surrounded by Spanish painters such as José Benlliure Gil, Emilio Sala Francés and José Villegas. And in Paris, he would get to know and be influenced by the painting of the realists and plein air painters (Adolph Menzel or Jules Bastien-Lepage).
Sorolla settled in Madrid in 1890, from where he would develop a professional career marked by successes, recognitions and national and international exhibitions. His painting deals with a variety of subjects, always from the perspective of naturalism, the speed of capture and execution, and the overwhelming mastery of light: issues of social denunciation, seafaring costumbrismo, resplendent scenes of beach and sea, interior landscapes, portraits, gardens, or the vision of Spain, the panels of the Hispanic Society of America in New York with which culminates his career.
On June 17, 1920, while painting a portrait of Mabel Rick in the gardens of his house, Sorolla suffers an attack of hemiplegia that leaves him unable to paint. He died in Cercedilla three years later, on August 10, 1923.
