Research

In 1897 Sorolla walked into the private laboratory of Luis Simarro, a Madrid doctor who studied the fine structure of the brain, and began painting on the spot, coming back each evening to work. Simarro mattered to Spanish science. He had brought home from abroad the silver-staining methods that let researchers, Santiago Ramon y Cajal above all, actually see a single nerve cell. Sorolla painted the men bent over their instruments in the warm reddish light of a gas burner, while a thin mauve daylight fades at the window behind them. He showed it that same year at the National Exhibition in Madrid and took its highest prize. He never sold it, nor the companion portrait of Simarro at his microscope; both stayed with the family.