The Drunkard, Zarauz (El Borracho, Zarauz)

Sorolla spent the summer of 1910 in Zarauz, on the Basque coast, and part of it indoors, in the gloom of a local tavern, where he painted six scenes. For ten years he had kept to portraits and sunlit beaches, and this was his first return to a hard social subject since 1899. Five men crowd around a table with bottles. The main drinker, glass in hand, grins at the painter through watery eyes while another offers him more cider in mockery, and a young man stares out with open hostility. Sorolla understood the drinker's name to be Moscorra, though in Basque the word means drunkard, so he may have misheard the locals. It is a big, fast sketch, figures cut off at the edges like an awkward snapshot. He thought well enough of it to send it to his retrospective in Chicago in 1911.