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Item Number: 136183
Title: SOROLLA in America : Friends and Patrons
Author: Colomer, Jose Luis ; Blanca Pons Sorolla (et al)
Price: Not Available
ISBN: 9788415245469
Description: Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2015. 30cm., hardcover, 408pp. illus. English text. Summary: Joaqui´n Sorolla y Bastida (1863–1923) enjoyed widespread fame in America’s Gilded Age, when museums contended to host his solo exhibitions in 1909 and 1911, and the purchase of his paintings was a matter of pride for public and private collections. This volume studies the web of personal relationships that underlay this collective fascination for Sorolla, the most admired Spanish artist outside Spain in the early twentieth century. Several types of figures played a significant part in this success story: Sorolla’s first buyers in the United States, who introduced the Spanish artist to America by displaying their purchases in public view; the directors of the nascent art museums of St. Louis, Buffalo, and Chicago, who organized the blockbuster Sorolla exhibitions and the social events related to the artist’s presence in these cities; key collectors and supporters, such as Archer M. Huntington—who not only hosted Sorolla’s legendary New York exhibition at the Hispanic Society, but also bore the main expenses of his triumphant American tour—, and Thomas Fortune Ryan, his second greatest fan in America, who owned at least 29 paintings by the Spanish master. Another group of characters in our story is made up of American artists with whom Sorolla enjoyed personal and professional relationships: mentors or colleagues such as John Singer Sargent and William Merritt Chase; beginners like Cadwallader L. Washburn and William E.B. Starkweather, who had studied with him at his Madrid studio; Louis Comfort Tiffany sat for Sorolla in 1911, when he was at the pinnacle of his remarkable career as a designer; Raimundo de Madrazo, Sorolla’s predecessor as a portraitist of American High Society in the 1890s. The group of people featured in this book accounts for a considerable part of the commissions Sorolla worked on in several American cities, as well as the sale of the vast majority of works he brought with him from Spain. The subsequent circulation of these works and the changing appreciation for Sorolla throughout more than a century are examined in the culminating essay: a retrospective study of Sorolla’s fortunes in the art market, which is ultimately a gauge of his international success.
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