And They Still Say Fish is Expensive!

The title is a bitter one, and it comes from a novel. Sorolla borrowed it from the last pages of Flor de mayo by his friend the Valencian writer Vicente Blasco Ibanez, where a grieving aunt spits out that fish, after all this, is still called expensive. Sorolla was 31 in 1894 and painting social realism, the serious subject in fashion in the Madrid art world. He takes us into the dim hold of a fishing boat where a boy lies injured on the boards, his chest bare and bleeding, while two weathered older fishermen hold him up and press the wound. Around them are the barrel, the nets, the catch. The picture won him a first-class medal at the national exhibition the following year, in 1895.