Sorolla and Vallotton

Sorolla and Vallotton

A couple of London exhibitions (overlapping in just the first week of July) have brought merited recognition to two largely overlooked artists (overlooked in Britain). Sorolla and Vallotton were contemporaries, living and working in the late C19 and early C20, both dying aged 60 within 2 years of one another. Sorolla was Spanish; Vallotton Swiss-French. Both enjoyed success in their lifetime, Sorolla the more conventionally (he sold well in the US).

Sorolla was the more talented painter; Valltton the more versatile artist, exploring many different styles of painting and being a pre-eminent master of, and innovator in, woodcut techniques. Sorolla’s themes are fairly conventional, though his execution anything but; Vallotton was an unsettling realist, an unsettling unrealist, a satirist and humourist.

For once in recent times, the titles of the exhibitions do not mislead. (I am thinking especially of titles bigging up the stars among lesser-known artists in some epochal or thematic survey- for example, the Tate’s Impressionists in Londonand All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life).

At the National Gallery the now finished Sorolla exhibition was called Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light. At the Royal Academy, the current Vallotton exhibition is called Felix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet. Both labels are accurate summaries of each artist’s central quality (although one might quibble and say that the wider description Artist is better than Painter for Vallotton).

With a few exceptions (see later) Sorolla’s subject matter is pretty “safe”- sea scenes, shore scenes, garden scenes, bedroom scenes. But what treatment! Mastery of billowing or flowing white textures, of rippling blue but transparent waters, of lush gardens.

Sorolla often paints on a huge scale, to which reproductions do scant justice: all the more impressive his “mastery of light”. And, indeed, he made a lucrative late career from massive paintings of “typical” Spanish regional scenes, commissioned by admiring US hispanophiles. 

Sorolla was, in summary, an extremely talented establishment painter of his time, whose reputation has been undeservedly left behind as more daring modern artists advanced during the course of the C20.

Like Vallotton, Sorolla married and stayed married. Both artists made models of their wives and children. Some of Sorolla’s paintings of his family are exceptionally moving in their intimate sensuality or tenderness.

And here is an interesting point of contrast between him and Vallotton. Vallatton’s family portraits are, on the whole, somewhat full of foreboding, blocked out in his trademark darks and monochromes. Sorolla’s pulse with elegance, movement or languor, and, yes, an abundance of light and colour. 

Very occasionally Sorolla departed from usual subject matters. In the London exhibition were two examples (perhaps there are few, if any, more). Another Margarita is a picture of a woman under arrest for prostitution, or infanticide. It was a commercially successful painting. 

The other is Sad Inheritance. Near his native Valencia, Sorolla witnessed a group of crippled children, probably orphans, probably the victims of polio or parental syphilis. It is, to be sure, one of his sea shore scenes, but one of pitying melancholy.

Vallotton had an opposite temperament. He was a satirist, a master of oblique observation of foibles, follies and betrayals. He was especially keen on skewering the sexual mores of bourgeois Paris.

His range of skills was wide. Woodcuts, and hence newspaper and magazine reproductions, made his name. His illustrations of Parisian scenes are usually witty, but sometimes gruesome accounts of riot or accident. 

His more stylised and affectionate woodcuts put me in mind of the cartoons of HE Bateman (I don’t know whether the latter was a fan, though we are told that Aubrey Beardsley was).

Vallotton’s landscapes are distinctly non-Sorollian. Mostly set at night, or at sunset; schematic colours; mysterious, and sometimes threatening- like the painting of a wood-surrounded pond, overcast by a canine-headed shadow.

Vallotton liked painting nudes, but, unlike Sorolla, not modelled by his wife. Coolly observed and not intended to flatter; unambiguous – apart from the fascinating, Manet-inspired White and Black.

July 2019