Joaquín Sorolla

Galería Theo, Madrid

Purchased from the above by the father of the present owners in February 1976; thence by descent

Bernardino de Pantorba, La Vida y la obra de Joaquín Sorolla, Madrid, 1970, p. 183, no. 1424

Executed in 1902, this intimate work belies the new-found fame Sorolla was enjoying at this time, following his success at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, at which we was awarded the Grand Prix for his monumental painting Sad Inheritance, which led the following year to the French state bestowing on him the highest honour of the land, the Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur.

The life of the humble and hard-working fishing community of his native Valencia was always close to the artist’s heart and at the centre of his art, despite his burgeoning international fame across Europe and America. Like Millet who elevated the French peasant to heights above his social station, so Sorolla found in the fisherfolk of Spain the epitome of pride and Spain’s enduring traditions.

Here, a woman in local costume busies herself mending the nets for the next fishing outing. In the background on the beach can be seen the billowing sails of the boats just landed or about to embark. At the same time, the artist introduces a narrative to draw the viewer in: a girlfriend has arrived on the scene with an eligible young man, fishing to become the matchmaker; but for now at least, the intended ‘catch’ plays hard to get, keeping her friend, and her suitor, in suspense.

Mending the Nets in many ways reprises a composition painted almost a decade earlier, Fishing Nets, of 1893 (private collection), similarly of a woman, in the company of her father, looking from the courtyard of her home out on to the beach, with a young fisherman looking in. Overall, it forms part of the series of works Sorolla painted throughout his career of local people mending sails and nets, the mainstays of their livelihoods. The most famous of these, Sewing the Sail (1896), a monumental canvas measuring 220 by 302cm, is in the collection of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Ca’Pesaro, Venice.