Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863–1923) painted light the way other men painted objects. Born in Valencia on 27 February 1863, orphaned at two and raised by an aunt and uncle, he grew up in a port city whose glare off the water became the subject of his life’s work.
He trained at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Carlos in Valencia, and at twenty-two won a grant that took him to Rome for four years. In 1888 he returned to Valencia to marry Clotilde García del Castillo, whom he had met in her father’s studio. The beach at El Cabanyal, the fishermen hauling their boats onto the sand, the white shirts and wet skin of children in the surf: these were the motifs he returned to for three decades.
Critics file him with the Impressionists, and he knew their work, but his own method was different enough to earn its own name — luminism. Where Monet dissolved form into optical vibration, Sorolla built light out of paint itself, loading the canvas so thickly that the pigment catches the room it hangs in. He died in Madrid on 10 August 1923. His house there is now the Museo Sorolla.