Madre

Sorolla began this to mark the birth of his daughter Elena in July 1895, though he did not finish it until 1900. It shows his wife, Clotilde, lying in bed beside the newborn, the two of them almost swallowed by a great expanse of white sheets and pillows. Only their heads emerge, the baby's small and smiling, the mother's pale and tired, the two of them turned toward each other. Nearly the whole canvas is given over to white on white, and the problem Sorolla set himself was to keep all that whiteness alive with the faint colours of filtered light. He never sold it. It still hangs in the Madrid house he built and lived in, now his museum.