Children on the Beach

José Navarro Llorens’s work can be located midway between that of Fortuny and Sorolla. From the former Navarro derived his taste for tableautins or small genre paintings that Fortuny’s dealer Goupil had made fashionable in Paris. From the latter Navarro acquired his interest in beach scenes and the depiction of the light on the Spanish Levant coast. A modest, solitary man, Navarro did not pursue a traditional career and only participated in a National Exhibition on one occasion, in 1895. A contemporary of Sorolla, he focused on colourful, sketchily painted genre scenes which he preferred to locate in outdoor settings. Small compositions, such as the present Children on the Beach, were among his preferred formats and were one in which the artist made full use of his short, abbreviated brushstrokes (in contrast to Sorolla’s long, sweeping ones) that allowed him to depict reality in the Luminist style. In 1908 Navarro spent a period in Rio de Janeiro where his work was received with great enthusiasm. As the critic José Francés has noted, Navarro’s dealers took full advantage of this fame, using it to exploit the “astonishing similarity of approach that on many occasions brought Navarro’s sketches and rapid annotations extremely close to those of Sorolla”, a similarity that is clearly evident in the present work.