Sorolla Museum

Step off a busy Madrid street into the Sorolla Museum and you are inside a painter's home left almost exactly as he knew it. Joaquín Sorolla, the Valencian who became Spain's great painter of sunlight, built this house and studio around 1910 and lived here until a stroke stopped him painting in 1920. He died three years later.

Sorolla designed the gardens himself, in an Andalusian style, with tiled fountains and clipped hedges that throw the same dappled light you see all through his beach scenes. Inside, the main studio still holds his easels, his brushes, and the low couch where he rested, along with hundreds of his canvases hung frame to frame.

His widow, Clotilde García, gave the whole property to the Spanish state, house, garden and roughly 1,200 paintings, and it opened as a museum in 1932. Look for the quick oil sketches of his wife and children on the terrace, painted in an afternoon, that he never meant to sell.