고기잡이에서 돌아옴

Two oxen strain up the wet sand, dragging a fishing boat home onto the beach at El Cabañal, on the coast of Valencia where Joaquín Sorolla grew up. He painted this large canvas in 1894 and sent it to the Paris Salon of 1895, staking his reputation on it. The gamble paid. It won a second-class gold medal, the highest honor open to a foreign artist, and the French State bought it for the national collection. Parisians loved its Mediterranean light and the plain hard labor in it. The picture is usually seen as the turning point where Sorolla found his real subject, the working coast of his home region under a blazing southern sun. It has hung in Paris ever since, and now belongs to the Musée d'Orsay.