Cucendo la vela

Sorolla painted this in 1896 on the seafront at Valencia, his home city on Spain's Mediterranean coast, where he set up outdoors to catch sunlight the way the French Impressionists did but without ever loosening his grip on drawing. It is a big canvas, about three metres wide, showing a group of women and a couple of men spreading and stitching an enormous boat sail under a vine trellis, the light coming through the leaves in shifting patches across the cloth. The women were most likely the wives of local fishermen. At the Venice Biennale of 1905 the city bought the picture for its modern gallery at Ca' Pesaro, where it still hangs.