Studio: international art (38.1906)

The Portrait Work of Joaquin Sorolla

merited by time and by experience. With imper-
turbable, well-educated dubiousness he seems to
be interrogating us upon the final purpose of his
merits or (if we should happen to possess any)
our own. The work of Echegaray is much and
even bitterly disputed by contemporary Spain.
Many of her modern critics find his drama anti-
quated and unreal. He seems prepared, upon this
canvas of Sorolla’s, to reply to such a charge.
“ Gentlemen,” he seems to say, “ the world is old,
and I am old, and even you may some day grow
acquainted with the soothing scepticism of old age.
This earth of ours is not, as fledgling sages think,
a revolutionary red, but simply grey—just like the
colour of my dramas, or my conversation, or my
eyes, the background to this portrait, or the ashes
of my cigarette.”

In the charming study called My Daughters,
landscape and human portraiture go delicately and
deliciously united. With artless elegance, two little
girls repose in garden chairs in a sweet, unceremo-
nious garden of this lazy land, the shadows of the
vine leaves falling across their swarthy skin. The
hour is that of the siesta on a summer’s day, with
no breath of air to fan the sluggish canopy of vine.

Lolita, too, is a child impression, frankly in the

treatment of Velazquez—the face, the dressing ot
the hair, the pale blue frock against a green and buff
background, the tapestried arm-chair behind a
solemn little figure with big black eyes and pert
little mouth.

Such are a bare half-dozen from this multitude
of master-portraits. Would that I had the talent
and the time to tell, as they deserve, the merit of
them all. Prodigies of life and truth, prodigies of
technique are here. Thoroughly responding to the
days we live in and the spirit of our age ; beautiful
and bold, unservile aud unselfish, seeking the
truth always and always palpitating with the presence
of the same; rapid in workmanship, incisive, sure,
no dawdling, either with the eye or with the brush ;
discerning essence from conventionality or arti-
fice ; sifting the jewel from the paste, the vital
characteristic from the casual circumstance—such
is the portrait-work of Joaquin Sorolla; whereof,
re-echoing Emerson’s words, new generations shall
decide, when only books, or bones, or portraits of
ourselves remain, that “this perpetual modernness
is the measure of merit in every work of art: since
the author of it was not misled by anything short-
lived or local, but abode by real and abiding
traits.” Leonard Williams.

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