DOI Heft:
No. 159 (June, 1906)
DOI Artikel:Williams, Leonard: The portrait-work of Joaquin Sorolla
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.20715#0053
The Portrait JVork of Joaquin Sorolla
remark. From the twinkle in his eye the thought
should be worth listening to. At any rate he has
a frank and wholesome sympathetic face. Whether
his jokes be good or not, we feel we should enjoy
an hour in his company.
Widely contrasting with the last is Christian
Franzen, the Danish photographer, who has made
his home in Madrid; also in his humbler way an
artist of extended fame—a Sorolla of the camera,
we might call him. It is a pallid, earnest, interest-
ing face, with pallid hair and eyes—a face tinged
with Scandinavian sweetness, Scandinavian melan-
choly.
The portrait of Spain’s most fertile and most
popular novelist, Benito Perez Galdds, is admir-
ably simple, admirably clear. The author of the
“National Episodes” looks quietly at us with his eyes
half-closed. Looking and thinking go together
here. Many go through the world with eyes wide
open, yet see nothing. This man, with half-closed
eyes, appears to be seeing little, but is observing
and investigating all.
No less devoted to a life of study and research
is Manuel Cosslo, the art critic, who has written and
will very shortly publish a definite and detailed
life of that extraordinary painter who resided at
the capital of older Spain, Greco, at once a modern
and a mediseval. As to its execution, the face
before us seems to augur well. A splendidly direct
and simple portrait, like that other of the novelist
Galdds; the eyes are contemplative and serene,
the mouth determined—a patient, earnest, unbiased
man, qualified both by natural taste and by pro-
tracted scholarship to venture on the stormy waters
of biography and criticism.
Another of Sorolla’s portraits is that of the Seiiora
de Laiglesia, who is half reclining in a low chair.
Her features, classically regular, are turned from us
in profile. Her air is one of easy and well-educated
affluence. A classic tone, accentuated by the Grecian
dressing of the hair, pervades this portrait; some-
thing spontaneously harmonious and well-chosen,
a spirit of innate simplicity and luxury combined,
such as pervaded, once upon a time, that admir-
able commonwealth whose every act and aspiration
were inherently invested with the form of art.
The portrait of Echegaray, co-winner with the
poet Mistral of the Nobel prize, a poet and philo-
sopher, a financier, a statesman, an engineer and
mathematician, an orator and lecturer, and the
author of innumerable plays, is in itself a world of
portraiture. The attitude is part and parcel
of the man, a posture into which, through stress
of years, he has unconsciously fallen. A courteous
scepticism shadowed by the limpness of the pos-
ture as a whole, pervades these features parch-
PORTRAIT OF ANTONIO GOMAR
BY JOAQUIN SOROLLA
32
remark. From the twinkle in his eye the thought
should be worth listening to. At any rate he has
a frank and wholesome sympathetic face. Whether
his jokes be good or not, we feel we should enjoy
an hour in his company.
Widely contrasting with the last is Christian
Franzen, the Danish photographer, who has made
his home in Madrid; also in his humbler way an
artist of extended fame—a Sorolla of the camera,
we might call him. It is a pallid, earnest, interest-
ing face, with pallid hair and eyes—a face tinged
with Scandinavian sweetness, Scandinavian melan-
choly.
The portrait of Spain’s most fertile and most
popular novelist, Benito Perez Galdds, is admir-
ably simple, admirably clear. The author of the
“National Episodes” looks quietly at us with his eyes
half-closed. Looking and thinking go together
here. Many go through the world with eyes wide
open, yet see nothing. This man, with half-closed
eyes, appears to be seeing little, but is observing
and investigating all.
No less devoted to a life of study and research
is Manuel Cosslo, the art critic, who has written and
will very shortly publish a definite and detailed
life of that extraordinary painter who resided at
the capital of older Spain, Greco, at once a modern
and a mediseval. As to its execution, the face
before us seems to augur well. A splendidly direct
and simple portrait, like that other of the novelist
Galdds; the eyes are contemplative and serene,
the mouth determined—a patient, earnest, unbiased
man, qualified both by natural taste and by pro-
tracted scholarship to venture on the stormy waters
of biography and criticism.
Another of Sorolla’s portraits is that of the Seiiora
de Laiglesia, who is half reclining in a low chair.
Her features, classically regular, are turned from us
in profile. Her air is one of easy and well-educated
affluence. A classic tone, accentuated by the Grecian
dressing of the hair, pervades this portrait; some-
thing spontaneously harmonious and well-chosen,
a spirit of innate simplicity and luxury combined,
such as pervaded, once upon a time, that admir-
able commonwealth whose every act and aspiration
were inherently invested with the form of art.
The portrait of Echegaray, co-winner with the
poet Mistral of the Nobel prize, a poet and philo-
sopher, a financier, a statesman, an engineer and
mathematician, an orator and lecturer, and the
author of innumerable plays, is in itself a world of
portraiture. The attitude is part and parcel
of the man, a posture into which, through stress
of years, he has unconsciously fallen. A courteous
scepticism shadowed by the limpness of the pos-
ture as a whole, pervades these features parch-
PORTRAIT OF ANTONIO GOMAR
BY JOAQUIN SOROLLA
32