Breakwater, San Sebastian

In 1917 and 1918 the artist and his family spent the summer in “Villa Sorolla”, a house on the slopes of Monte Igueldo in San Sebastian. There he made many small sketches, most of them on the beach in San Sebastian seen in various photographs. This painting shows a scene on the promenade at San Sebastian. The cloudy sky and stormy atmosphere alter the artist’s palette here, with the grey-greens of the water complemented by the purplish tones used for the dark clouds. Here Sorolla demonstrates his outstanding perceptive capacity for capturing the subtleties of the atmospheric phenomenon.

Most of Sorolla’s paintings at the beach in San Sebastian, Biarritz and Zarauz are different from his Mediterranean scenes and more sophisticated. In Valencia the figures belong to the sea, but here they merely watch it from the promenade, like the audience watching a performance from a box in a theatre.