Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida’s impressive life-sized Viejo castellano sirviéndose vino (The Old Man of Castille) was painted in 1907, a particularly successful and productive year for the artist’s figural painting.  This compositional series can be divided into themes: portraits of Spanish royals, members of Sorolla’s family and, as with the present work, depictions of regional people.  Sorolla began the series in El Pardo, north of Madrid, and later Segovia, while his daughter María recovered from tuberculosis, before traveling further north to Léon, where he made extensive oil sketches and drawings of local life.  These studies shaped the present work and others of the period, which demonstrate the artist’s interest in ethnography and variations in Spain’s regional dress, customs, and culture.  The “old man” of the present work is enrobed by multiple layers of a heavy brown cloak— with textured swaths of paint and subtle tonal shifts suggesting its rough-spun cloth—which frames his grey stubbled and sun-reddened skin, as a bandaged hand emerges to pour wine from a green and yellow glazed clay pitcher.  The dark, earthy tones of the man’s costume stand against the white plaster wall, the bright sun casting the shifting shadow of an unseen tree. Sorolla’s expressive brushwork, impressionistic shifts of light and shade, and cropping of the compositional space suggest both a casually observed moment of daily life and careful study.  The present work directly informed Sorolla’s larger composition Leonese Peasants (1907, The Hispanic Society of America, New York, fig. 1), in which a similar cloaked figure stands among a group of market-goers, each individual serving as a realist portrait linking regional traditions and contemporary Spain. 

Beyond his facility with a paintbrush, Sorolla was also an astute businessman, finding success at international art competitions in Paris and London which led him to a series of well received exhibitions in both Europe and the United States. Viejo castellano sirviéndose vino was featured in one of the first of these exhibitions, Sorolla’s one-man show at London’s Grafton Galleries in 1908.   The following year, philanthropist Archer M. Huntington invited the artist to exhibit at The Hispanic Society of America, the institution he founded in New York City.  On opening day in February 1909, the present work joined 355 other paintings by the artist on view for four weeks, during which 170,000 visitors purchased 28,000 copies of the catalogue.  While over the course of the New York exhibition Sorolla sold 150 paintings, Viejo castellano sirviéndose vino travelled to the Albright Art Gallery on the invitation of its director Charles M. Kurtz who anticipated the show would “be worth traveling hundreds of miles to see and study” (the exhibition’s final venue was The Copley Society of Boston) (“Joaquin Sorolla-y-Bastida, A Modern Master,” Academy Notes, vol. IV, no. 10, March 1909, p. 172). Though a smaller show, the huge crowds remained, with a local newspaper reporting “never in the history of the gallery has there been such an attendance at any exhibition.  Throngs are in the gallery at all hours and many persons make almost daily visits there” (“Last Week of Sorolla,” Buffalo Morning Express, April 5, 1909, as quoted in Blanca Pons-Sorolla, “Sorolla and America,” Sorolla and America, exh. cat, Meadows Museum, Dallas; The San Diego Museum of Art, 2014, p. 22).  As testified to by Kurtz (and illustrated by a contemporary photo of the installation (fig. 2) Sorolla’s work had never before been so beautifully displayed “with exceedingly liberal spacing… and where the pictures are grouped together, the arrangement is such that each work appears to be enhanced by juxtaposition with the others” (“Joaquín Sorolla-y-Bastida: His Wonderful Collection of Paintings at the Albright Gallery,” Academy Notes, April 1909, vol. IV, no. 11 p. 163).  Notably, Kurtz, explained “one cannot fail to be impressed by the painting, “An Old Castilian,” hanging on the marble doorway in the north wall…. This is a work as strong, as realistic, and as typically Spanish as anything painted by Velásquez.  It is one of the great works of the collection” and unsurprisingly soon entered the permanent collection for the Albright Art Gallery (“Joaquín Sorolla-y-Bastida: His Wonderful Collection of Paintings at the Albright Gallery,” p. 185).  

Beyond its impressive technique and scale, Viejo castellano sirviéndose vino was a particularly apt selection for an American institution.  In its subject of a humble figure absorbed in a daily task, the portrait’s theme appealed to an American public used to paintings of rural individualism in contemporary European and American art.  At the same time, as Kurtz recognized, the monumental portrait of the common man connected Sorolla to the foundational giants of Spanish art history, notably Velásquez — whose seventeenth-century experiments in realism through his genre portraiture, such as his Menippus of circa 1638, had reinvigorated other Spanish artists seeking ways to communicate the essence of their country (Joaquín Sorolla 1863-1923, exh. cat., Museo Nacional del Prado, 2009, p. 380-1. fig. 3).  Aptly, when illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, the present work was accompanied by a discussion both of Sorolla’s inheritance of Old Master traditions and his modern spirit of “sincerity and actuality and sympathy” which made his “rendering of Spanish life at once so beautiful and so robust, establishing our belief that not only are they of vital interest now, but of a value which shall palpitate in far futurity” (Leonard Williams, “The Art of Joaquín Sorolla,” Catalogue of Paintings by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, exh. cat., 1909,  p. 43).  Indeed, Viejo castellano sirviéndose vino helped secure the artist’s international reputation, the image seen as both specifically Spanish and universally human, a theme the artist would expand in his epic series of celebrated murals, the Vision of Spain, which he painted for The Hispanic Society just four years later.