At the dawn of a terrible epoch, two painters from very different backgrounds produced the startlingly joyful, light-filled work which is now the subject of a major exhibition, writes Lara Marlowein Paris
The Spanish painter, Joaquín Sorolla, was born in Valencia, on the Mediterranean coast, in 1863. In the summer of 1909, he returned there to paint a series of large canvases of women and children on the beach. The result, on exhibit at the Petit Palais, is a moment of pure happiness, a seaside holiday flooded with sunshine.
There are other pleasures to be found in Painters of Light: Sargent and Sorolla". John Singer Sargent's portaits of American and British gentry are stunning in their beauty and grasp of psychology. But none equals the burst of joy in the room with Sorolla's beach scenes.
With easy, rapid brushstrokes, Sorolla painted a little girl, poised to jump into the sea. In another canvas, a nursemaid holds a parasol over a baby while two girls frolic in ankle-deep water. In Despues del baño (After the Swim), Sorolla paints two adolescents who have just pulled on long sleeveless dresses after a swim. Other children can be seen in the background, still in the water. The almost Grecian, classical poses and draperies prefigure La bata rosa (The Pink Dress) in the last room of the exhibition.
In Las dos hermanas (The Two Sisters), a grinning child clutches her small sister by one hand, and shields her sunburned face with the other, looking towards the painter, as if in a snapsnot.
As an art student, Sorolla had met the photographer, Antonio Garcia, who became his patron. In 1888, Sorolla married Garcia's daughter, Clothilde, and his paintings chronicle their happy marriage. Like Pierre-Auguste Renoir before him, Sorolla marvelled at the world of women and children, which he conveyed to perfection. He was influenced by photography, and an earlier beach painting, of Clothilde at Biarritz in 1906, shows his wife sitting on the sand, holding a camera in her gloved hands.
In the 1909 series, Sorolla's wife and daughter stroll on the strand, purple-blue waves behind them. You feel the strength of the sun in the blinding white of their dresses, and the depth of the shadows. The older woman makes a half-hearted attempt to shield herself, raising a hand to her veiled straw hat. But both women seem frozen by the sun's power. Clothilde lets her parasol lapse in the breeze. Their daughter dangles her hat.
Paseo a orillas del mar (Walk by the Sea) is one of two signature paintings for the exhibition. The other is John Singer Sargent's Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, painted in 1892. The wife of a Scottish baron, Lady Agnew wears a white organza dress with a lilac-coloured sash at the waist and matching bows on the sleeves. She is infinitely refined, ensconced on her Louis XV armchair, against an oriental silk backdrop. Yet there is something playful in her smile, in the way she drops one hand over the edge of the armchair.
In his day, Sargent was considered the greatest living portrait painter, a modern Van Dyck. He had to leave Paris for London in 1884 after his portrait of Madame X, in reality a banker's wife named Gautreau, created a scandal. That portrait now belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and is unfortunately not part of the exhibition. Though the model wore a low-cut black sleeveless dress held in place by two jewelled straps, it is difficult to understand why it created such a fuss.
Sargent enjoyed huge success in Britain and America, where everyone who was anyone clamoured to sit for him. He painted millionaires Rockefeller and Vanderbilt, politician Theodore Roosevelt and writers Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James.
Sargent often turned commissioned portraits into stylistic exercises, painting the clothing and background with rough strokes and saving the fine detail and introspection for the faces. His portrait, Arthur George Maule Ramsay, Lord Dalhousie, still belongs to the earl's family. In his white suit, striking a pose against white marble columns, the British aristocrat is "unbearably pretentious and arrogant", says Dominique Morel, the curator of the Petit Palais. Sargent seems to mock his sitter by painting the imprint of sunburn left by Dalhousie's hat.
SOROLLA AND SARGENT came from very different backgrounds. The Spaniard was orphaned at the age of the age of two and was raised by his uncle, a blacksmith. The regional government recognised the young Joaquín's talent and gave him a scholarship to study art in Italy.
Though both painters have been called post- impressionist, Morel prefers to link them to the realist tradition of Courbet.
"They painted daily life and nature, but on a scale that enabled them to exhibit in the salons," he says. "They captured the truth of contemporary characters."
Sargent was born in Florence in 1856 to American parents. His father was a doctor, his mother was from a wealthy trading family. After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, Sargent moved to Paris in 1874 to study with the French painter, Carolus-Duran, who taught him to paint instinctively and quickly, without preparatory sketches.
"Sargent was American by birth, French by his paintbrush, and totally cosmopolitan," says Morel.
The two painters met at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris, where both exhibited paintings to great acclaim.
"They wrote to one another, gave each other paintings, admired each other," says Morel. "But their relationship was always one of fellow painters, never close friends."
In the 1880s and 1890s, Sorolla was influenced by the social realism then in fashion in Spain. Three striking examples of this period are La vuelta de la pesca (Return from Fishing), in which oxen pull a fishing boat to shore, Trata de blancas (White Slavery), showing young prostitutes accompanied by an old women in a third-class train compartment, and El experimento (The Experiment), where a scientist labours in a laboratory as students look on.
Sargent, like Sorolla, was influenced by the 17th-century Spanish painter, Velasquez. A lifelong traveller, Sargent copied Velasquez's Jester, painted Spanish dancers in Madrid and executed a haunting portrait of a gypsy in Venice.
In a room of group portraits, the similarities between Sargent and Sorolla are so strong that it is easy to confuse the two. Both make good use of the colour red, though Sargent's subdued Venetian tones are outdone by Sorolla's brilliant blood-red. Sorolla's painting of Rafael Errazuriz, the Chilean consul, and his family, is reminiscent of Velasquez's 1656 masterpiece, Las Meninas, with Errazuriz's eldest daughter strongly resembling the Spanish infanta.
BOTH PAINTERS ENJOYED wealth and fame early in life and both exhausted themselves with major public commissions, Sargent for the Boston Public Library, Sorolla for the Hispanic Society in New York. By the end of their careers, both could afford the luxury of turning down work. Sargent declined an offer to paint the coronation of Edward VII and refused the position of President of the Royal Academy in London.
Though his depictions are often more controlled, more finely executed, nothing in Sargent rivals the warm intimacy of Sorolla's family paintings, of My mujer y mis hijas en el jardín (My Wife and My Daughers in the Garden) or Madre (Mother), in which Sorolla painted his wife Clothilde, tenderly watching her newborn third child, Elena, in a cloud-like white bed.
Sorolla spent his last years painting Spanish gardens, while Sargent kept a diary of his travels in watercolours. Curator Dominique Morel and Philippe Maffre, the museum scenographer who designed the exhibition, were thrilled to find similar paintings of women lying in the grass to close the show. Two Girls in White Dresses, by Sargent, and Sorolla's La Siesta were both completed in 1911. In both, women lie like fallen blossoms on the ground. These canvases, replete with repose at the dawn of a terrible epoch, provide a feminine coda to the painters' narrative of life at the turn of the last century.
Painters of Light: Sargent and Sorolla runs at the Petit Palais in Paris until May 13, 2007. Open daily from 10am until 6pm, except Mon and bank holidays. Until 8pm on Tue. See www.petitpalais.paris.fr for further information