Joaquín Sorolla
Paseo a orillas del mar
Women walking on the beach
Painted during the summer of 1909 at the beach in Valencia, after Sorolla’s triumphant success in the United States, Strolling along the Seashore is undoubtedly one of the artist’s most important works.
The water and the sandy seashore, depicted here in long blue, purple and turquoise brushstrokes, become an abstract backdrop for the refined figures of the artist’s wife and daughter Maria. The suggestion of the breeze in their floating draperies intensifies the fleeting moment captured here by the artist, along with the use of a clearly photographic frame which cuts through Clotilde’s wide-brimmed straw hat and leaves an empty swathe of sand in the lower foreground.