Mother

This canvas commemorates the birth of Elena, the artist’s younger daughter, on 12 July 1895, although the painting was not completed until 1900. Mother and daughter are shown resting peacefully or perhaps exhausted, turned towards each other, with only their heads emerging from a sea of white - the baby still rosy from the birth and the mother with a subtle pallor. This canvas is an exceptional technical feat and also one of the best examples of Sorolla’s ability to transmit intense physical sensations and equally intense emotion through his handling of light and colour. The emotion of the husband/father and the artist’s gaze are blended in the filtered light which caresses the whiteness from which the two heads emerge, as if the whole world is reduced to the all-absorbing intimacy of this moment of repose.