IV. Velázquez’s influence
As with so many other artists of his day,
Sorolla’s visits to the Museo del Prado,
where he was able to learn directly from
the great Spanish masters, had great
impact on his painting. Velázquez’s
influence on his work, which critics
recognized from the start, in the fi rst
canvases he presented to public contests
in Spain, became much more evident
following his international success in
Paris in 1900. From that moment on,
Sorolla adopted Velázquez’s models as his
own, alluding to some of his most famous
pieces and even copying the resources
used by the Sevillian artist.
Sorolla’s provocative Female
Nude—in which the artist secretly
celebrated the sensual quality of his
wife’s body—evokes Velázquez’s Venus at
her Mirror, while his family group
portraits are modelled after Las
Meninas. But references to the
Sevillian master’s works are not always
so direct. His admiration and
appropriation of the Sevillian master’s
portrait models resulted in dignifi ed
likenesses such as those of the Beruetes,
in which Sorolla achieves a
characteristic sensation of immediacy, or
that of The Photographer Christian
Franzen where, again mimicking
Velázquez, he provides the arresting
image of a shared gaze, creating a
disjunction between represented space and
real space.
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Joaquín Sorolla, Female Nude, Oil on canvas, 106 x 186 cm. 1902. Private collection
