白人女性の人身売買

The Sorolla people love is all Mediterranean light, children in the surf, white sails, sun on wet skin. This is the other Sorolla, from before the sunshine made him famous. In the 1890s he painted hard social subjects, and here the subject is trafficking. Four young women doze in the wooden seats of a third-class railway carriage, dressed like peasant girls, being moved between towns to be sold into prostitution. Only the old woman in black beside them stays awake, watching. Sorolla lets the carriage recede sharply toward us, so the cramped space feels like a trap with no way out. It was admired at the time, though strict Catholic critics complained he had dirtied his brush. He kept it, and it remained in his own collection in Madrid.