Il salto della corda

In the summer of 1907 Joaquín Sorolla was staying at La Granja de San Ildefonso, the royal palace gardens near Segovia, and he set up to paint the light coming through the trees. His younger daughter Elena is the girl in the foreground, caught at the top of a jump, the rope barely visible and her shadow already separated from her feet on the ground. Sorolla was after the split second, the way a photograph freezes it, and he had in fact worked from a snapshot of Elena skipping on the beach at Valencia in a nearly identical pose. The dappled sunlight and the blurred faces of the other girls keep the whole thing on the edge of a passing glimpse.