Vision of Spain

The man who made the Vision of Spain possible was no ordinary millionaire. Archer Milton Huntington (1870–1955) was the son of Arabella Worsham; when she married the railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington in 1884, Collis adopted the boy, and Archer became heir to one of the great American fortunes. Instead of merely enjoying it, he became a serious scholar — a poet, an archaeologist, and a translator who put the medieval Poema de Mio Cid, the great Spanish epic of El Cid, into English. Spain had gripped him since boyhood, and in 1904 he founded the Hispanic Society of America in upper Manhattan: a free museum and library devoted to the art and culture of the Spanish-speaking world, which opened to the public in 1908.

It was Huntington who carried Sorolla to America. In 1909 he staged a one-man show of the painter's work at the Hispanic Society that became a sensation — some 356 works on the walls, around 160,000 visitors through the doors in a single month, and close to 200 paintings sold. Few living artists have ever been received like that in New York. Two years later, in November 1911, Huntington offered him the commission that would occupy the rest of his working life.

Here the story turns on a creative conversation between patron and painter. Huntington's first thought was a history of Spain: great events, conquests, the procession of the centuries. Sorolla's heart lay elsewhere — not in the past but in a living Spain: its regions and peoples, its costumes and customs, its work and markets and festivals, seen in the open air and the present tense. Huntington, to his great credit, gave his artist free rein, and Sorolla gave the cycle the title that says exactly what he meant: The Provinces of Spain. So the vision at the heart of the work was Sorolla's own. What Huntington supplied was the frame: the idea of the whole breadth of Spain, gathered for an American public into one purpose-built room.

That frame explains the cycle's curious geography. Sorolla was a Valencian to his bones — twenty years of beach scenes had made his name almost a synonym for the light of his own coast — and yet Valencia receives only two of the fourteen panels (Las Grupas and the Palm Grove of Elche). The reason is the commission itself. Its whole purpose was to show Americans the range of Spain, and Valencia was already, in every gallery-goer's mind, simply Sorolla. So the work pushed him outward, into regions he knew far less well — the high tablelands of Castile, the Roncal valley of Navarre, the pilgrim roads of Galicia, the Basque country. Andalusia, by contrast, carries five panels, more than any other region: flamenco, the bull-running, the Holy Week procession — the picturesque south that the age took to be the most "Spanish" Spain of all.

A word on where this account comes from. The broad outline — the 1909 triumph, the 1911 commission, the quarrel over history versus a living Spain — is well documented; the definitive authority on Sorolla's life and work is his great-granddaughter, the art historian Blanca Pons-Sorolla, whose catalogue underpins everything serious written about him. Further reading: Wikipedia: Vision of Spain · Wikipedia: Archer Milton Huntington · The Hispanic Society

Sorolla painted these regional idylls between 1912 and 1919 — and the Spain just outside the frame was anything but idyllic. The country was still reeling from the loss of its last colonies in 1898; Barcelona had erupted in the bloodshed of the Semana Trágica in 1909; a general strike convulsed the nation in 1917; and the old order of monarchy, Church and landowner was straining against anarchism, socialism and the rising nationalisms of Catalonia and the Basque Country — the very regions he was painting as timeless and serene.

Within four years of the last panel, Spain fell under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera; by 1931 the king was gone; and in 1936 the country tore itself apart in a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands. The unified, harmonious Spain of folk dance and pilgrimage that Sorolla hung on the walls of New York was, even as he painted it, fracturing along precisely the regional and class lines his canvases smoothed away. That is the quiet tragedy of the cycle: he set out to capture a Spain "on the point of disappearing," and it disappeared more violently than he could have known.

Sorolla's catalogue runs to some 4,200 works — the first volume alone lists 1,063 paintings made between 1876 and 1894. Across his life that is more than two finished pictures a week, every week, for forty years. The natural question is where the shortcut was. There wasn't one. The truth is the opposite, and it is the most astonishing thing about him.

A great many of those works are beach studies painted alla prima — wet into wet, out of doors, in a single sitting, racing a shift of light that would not wait. Far from a trick, this is the hardest thing a painter can attempt: every stroke laid down once, correctly, with no glazing back over a mistake. Only a draughtsman of total command can work at that speed and be right. His quickness was never haste — it was mastery so complete it looked like ease.

And when the work demanded slowness, he gave it without stint. The grand portraits took days; the Vision of Spain took eight years and, in the end, his health — he was felled by a stroke at his easel in 1920 and scarcely painted again. That is not a man cutting corners. It is a man who could not stop looking, and who poured everything he had onto the canvas until there was nothing left to give.

To stand before a Sorolla is to watch sunlight caught alive by someone who painted faster, and saw light more truly, than almost anyone who has ever lived. The number is not a curiosity to be explained away. It is the measure of one of the greatest artists the world has known.