Contadina di Assisi

In 1888 Joaquín Sorolla was a young Valencian painter living on a scholarship in Italy, and he had left Rome for the hill town of Assisi to work among its people. This is one of the local women he painted there, a contadina, a peasant, standing in a field spotted with red poppies, a red scarf knotted at the back of her neck. He was 25 and had just married Clotilde back in Spain that same year. The loose, quick brushwork in the grass and flowers is the start of the outdoor painter he would become. This is years before the enormous sunlit beaches of Valencia that made him famous. Here he is still a student abroad, painting the countryside in front of him.