Strolling along the Seashore

Painted during the summer of 1909 at the beach in Valencia, after Sorolla’s triumphant success in the United States, Strolling along the Seashore is undoubtedly one of the artist’s most important works.The water and the sandy seashore, depicted here in long blue, purple and turquoise brushstrokes, become an abstract backdrop for the refined figures of the artist’s wife and daughter Maria. The suggestion of the breeze in their floating draperies intensifies the fleeting moment captured here by the artist, along with the use of a clearly photographic frame which cuts through Clotilde’s wide-brimmed straw hat and leaves an empty swathe of sand in the lower foreground.Although this is the same setting as in other Valencia seashore scenes, the tone here is very different. What we see here is a perfect example of the iconographic genre of the ‘elegant promenade’ with well-dressed bourgeois figures strolling along the seashore.