Beached Boats

Beached Boats is a charming, almost romantic scene where two fishing boats are captured moored by the shoreline of this picturesque location.

The style is entirely consistent with the later period of Joaquin Sorolla's career. He loved bright palettes which captured the light saturated Valencian coast, which was the native region of which he was so proud. The artist regularly featured the toils of local fishermen going about their daily tasks but in this example offers us a more relaxed depiction of the two boats without any sign of humanity at the time. Perhaps they have been dragged in for the day and will now remain motionless until the next morning arrives. The colours within this painting are beautifully blended, with his usual palette for this genre all present and correct. Sorolla particularly liked areas of bright white in his work and here we find it used in the sails of the boats as well as the breaking waves of the sea.

The boats themselves have complementary colours with red and blue bottoms that perfectly suits the surrounding colours. The vessels also provide some strong shadows which allows the artist to implement a greater feeling of depth and perspective. The sails themselves are probably responsible for the majority of the shadows which spread across the horizontal, just short of the shore. In this piece Sorolla does not feature much of the bare sandy beach, choosing to focus more on where the sea has already come in. The boats themselevs would have been dragged in and then carefully beached and likely receive precisely the same treatment each and every day from their owners. Sorolla chooses to section the painting perfectly into two halves, as marked by the horizontal line at which point sea and sky meet.

This artist became friends with a number of fellow artists during his own lifetime, including several within the US, a country in which his work seemed to be particularly well received and so encouraged him to return on multiple occasions. One man he knew well was John Singer Sargent, who himself is now considered one of the most famous American artists of all time. Their styles were not exactly identical, but there were certainly some similarities in the way in which they fell some way between realism and impressionism and also tackled quite a variety of genres across their careers. By the River, Fishing for Oysters at Cancale and Paul Helleu Sketching his Wife all bear certain similarities with the painting from Sorolla that we have in front of us here.