Le Baiser de la relique

Before Sorolla became the painter of blazing Mediterranean sunlight, he made his name with sober scenes like this one. Painted in 1893, it shows the inside of a village church where a line of country people bend, one after another, to kiss a relic held out by an old priest. The light is low and indoor, catching a bowed head here, a worn hand there. Sorolla was about 30 and watching closely how faith moved through a rural crowd, without mocking it and without preaching. The picture worked for him. The provincial council of Vizcaya bought it from an exhibition in Bilbao in 1894, and it went to the city's Fine Arts Museum in the Basque country, where it still hangs.