The Gardens at the Sorolla Family House

Between 1916 and 1920 Sorolla painted all aspects of the gardens at his Madrid home. He achieves technical and expressive freedom and a hugely important intimate vision in all his work. Sorolla highlights the explosion of colour and the play of light filtering through the plants in medium-sized canvases resolved with spontaneity. This is one of the later versions, painted in spring 1920. It shows an angle of the second and third gardens at the present Sorolla Museum. The presence of the wicker chair, normally used by the artist to paint, lends the painting a peculiar intensity and a melancholy point in a scene which, in general, transmits the happiness of a place given over to beauty and pleasure.