Snapshot, Biarritz

Canvas painted during the summer of 1906 from the Miramar Beach in Biarritz, where Sorolla and his family spent many summers. A woman, probably his wife Clotilde García del Castillo, is preparing a camera, seated on a canvas lying on the sand with the sea waves in the background. The camera she is holding in her hands could be the Kodak "Folding Pocket No. 0", the smallest Kodak pocket camera in existence to date, marketed in 1902. This painting is closer in execution and subject matter to those of the Impressionist painters, more elegant and the tones of his palette softened, on this occasion becoming more silvery. In 1906 Sorolla enjoyed great critical and financial success at his first one-man exhibition in Paris, from where he returned steeped in French painting.