Clotilde García del Castillo

This is Sorolla's wife, Clotilde Garcia del Castillo, painted in 1890, two years after they married and well before he became Spain's famous painter of sunlight and beaches. There is no sunlight here at all. She sits in a black dress against a bare, shadowless background, one hand raised to her cheek, and the whole picture is built from blacks, browns and the pale gold of a flower in her hair. Sorolla was looking back to Velazquez, the old Spanish master who could make a plain dark ground feel like real air around a figure. Clotilde would go on sitting for her husband for the rest of his life. Here she is barely twenty-five, watching him work.