Portrait de Benito Pérez Galdós

Joaquín Sorolla painted this in March 1894, and the two men became close friends. The sitter is Benito Pérez Galdós, the greatest Spanish novelist of the 19th century, the writer often placed just behind Cervantes. He is 51 here, seated on a bench, a cigar in a holder in one hand and a walking stick in the other, watching the viewer with a calm, slightly detached air. Sorolla, still in his early thirties and not yet the famous painter of sunlit beaches, gives him the plainness of a man more interested in observing than in being observed. The museum that holds the portrait keeps their letters too, the two of them praising each other's work back and forth for years.