Joaquín Sorolla Valencia 1863-Madrid 1923

A gift from the artist to the sitter; thence by descent to the present owners

Original canvas. There is a spot of retouching to the left side of the woman's shirt corresponding to a repair in the canvas and a line to the right of her hair (approx. 2cm. long) also corresponding to a repair in the canvas. There are some faint scuffs to the lower left corner, otherwise the paint surface is in good clean condition with areas of fine impasto. Held in an ornate plaster moulded gilt frame.
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It was in his portraits of family and friends that Sorolla was at his most spontaneous. 'I don't care how long you are preparing, how much pains you take to study your sitter. But when you get to work you should practically finish in a single sitting, because otherwise your sitter gets tired and changes his expression and you get tired too. I hate to have my work get cold and no matter how much labour may have been expended on the canvas, the result should look as if it has all been done with ease and at a single sitting.' (quoted by Carmen Gracia, The Painter Joaquín Sorolla, exh. cat., London, 1989, p. 97). 

Sorolla's robust attitude to portraiture as expressed in the above words is evident in the present work. The sitter's presence is conveyed through the directness of her gaze and contraposto pose. Silhouetted against a darkened room, Isabel Herraud de Fernández Corella is elegantly portrayed in a pale grey shirt made up of fluidly applied strokes that combine to create a sense of immediacy and realism.

Portraiture, including self-portraits, interested and occupied Sorolla throughout his working life. In his early years his subjects were his family and friends: Clotilde his wife and María, Joaquín and Elena his children; his father-in-law Antonio García, his friend the novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez and fellow artists Mariano Benlliure and Raimundo Madrazo. Following the success of his one man exhibitions in France, Germany, England and the USA in the first decade of the 20th Century portrait commissions flooded in. Many of his most important sitters were male: Archer Huntington, Louis Comfort Tiffany, President Taft and the King of Spain, Alfonso XIII being among his most exalted subjects. Among his most successful portraits, however, were those of female sitters whom he invariably imbued with an elegance and beauty that rank them alongside the portraits of his contemporaries Giovanni Boldini, Anders Zorn and John Singer Sargent.