Descent from the Cross in a Spanish fishing boat
In a painting 6ft 8in across, light falls on the pale skin of a young man, wounded from some accident, lying in the hold of a fishing boat. An old fisherman supports his head while another, in a black floppy Valencian beret or barretina, presses a pad against his wound. The painter of the canvas, bought by the Prado in 1895, was Joaquín Sorolla. Its title is Aún dicen que el pescado es caro! (“Still they say the price of fish is too high!”).
The picture is not as full of exhilarating light as many in the current exhibition at the National Gallery in London. It belongs to the early part of the career of Sorolla (1863-1923), when he was finding some success depicting scenes of social concern. The title of this painting was incorporated into a novel of ill-treated fisherfolk, Flor de Mayo by Vicente Blasco Ibánez, spoken by the angry grandmother of a young fisherman whose body is washed ashore.
I am glad the National Gallery is bringing attention to Sorolla, for very few of his paintings figure in public collections in Britain. I much admire him, and included a reproduction of the price-of-fish painting in a travel book, The Train in Spain, in 2013. There, I noted that the stricken young fisherman wore a medal of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a patron of seafarers. What I missed was a larger religious reference.
As Veronique Gerard Powell points out in the catalogue to the current exhibition, the solemn composition evokes depictions of the Descent from the Cross in which the older men Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea tend the body of Christ with the same sacred respect as Sorolla’s two fishermen. (Many a Spanish church, too, venerates a life-size polychrome sculpture of the dead Christ.)
A painting from a year earlier is slightly further away from the flowering of Sorolla’s sun-drenched style. El Beso de la Reliquia (Kissing the Relic) shows women in Valencian dress with silk scarves queuing to venerated a saint’s relic in an ostensory of silver and glass. Every detail is realised with virtuosity, down to the scuffed floor-tiles of the sacristy where it is set. The picture is usually in the excellent museum of fine art in Bilbao (not the flashy Guggenheim in that city).
I had not seen it as a religious picture in its own right. It seemed to belong to the custumbrista convention of scenes from traditional life, to which Sorolla returned in his last years. Indeed, I wondered whether the frown of the priest holding the reliquary was a criticism of the good women’s credulity.
Perhaps not, for I don’t know that Sorolla satirised religious practice. In fact, a difficult painting to look at (from 1899) implicitly praises the work of the religious brothers of St John of God. One of them stands by the sea’s edge in his black habit helping a boy with a crutch and withered legs into the water to bathe. A group of similarly afflicted boys hesitate on the brink or enjoy the small breaking waves. The title is Triste Herencia (“Sad Inheritance”). Sorolla had thought he might call it “Children of Pleasure”, because he meant to suggest that the children were affected with syphilis from their parents.
Sorolla’s art is for the most part not overtly religious, but it expresses a richly humane vision through a technique at times resembling that of his contemporary John Singer Sargent, who like him expressed a strong admiration for Velázquez. Both imitators possessed a mimetic genius that often seems miraculous.