Self-Portrait

By 1904 Joaquín Sorolla was the most famous painter in Spain and one of the best known in Europe, celebrated for beach scenes flooded with hard Mediterranean sunlight; Monet is supposed to have called him the master of light. This self-portrait is the opposite of that. He shows himself in a dark grey suit against a shadowy ground, sober and direct, the palette deliberately borrowed from the Spanish old masters of the 17th century he revered, and Velázquez above all. Sorolla painted few pictures of himself; he far preferred watching other people at work and play. Here he meets your eye squarely, a working painter at the height of a career he had built out of the very light he chose, this once, to leave out.