Fishing Boats

The Spanish painter Joaquin Sorolla was involved in the Impressionist style, particularly in the latter part of his life. One of the most prominent locations in his work would be the beaches of Valencia, which we see again within this painting, simply titled as Fishing Boats.

Boats would play a critical role within many of his seascapes, but serving different roles from one painting to the next. They would serve both leisure and commercial purposes, with local families setting off for fun, whilst others would be going about their hard working lives within the fishing industry. We see the latter here, and unusually Sorolla places a great collection of fishing boats together, when normally he would just focus on one or two in greater detail. Most of the upper half of the composition here is filled with the sails of these stunning vessels, and shadows are cast across them in order to vary the colour tones from one to the next. They are all poised very close to shore, suggesting that the working day is either about to begin, or has perhaps been completed for the day. Sorolla would in other paintings feature these boats being dragged around by a combination of humans and animals.

This painting, known simply as Fishing Boats, was completed in 1915 and now resides within a private collection. The style and content included here, along with the size of the painting of 126cm by 88cm would ensure that this piece would receive a considerable valuation were it ever to come up for auction. The painting itself is also beautiful and can be considered one of the artist's best, thus ensuring many more bidders would potentially be interested in this item. There are a number of large art galleries and museums around the world, such as in the UK, Germany and Italy who do not currently hold any Sorolla paintings within their collections and his reputation and popularity ensures that they would wish to rectify this situation, whenever any become available.

The artist would help to put Valencia on the artistic map, because of the beauty of his work and also the large number of paintings that feature the city within his career. He would travel around extensively in order to promote his career but never lost touch with his roots and did more than anyone to draw our attention to the beauty of this region. Whilst here the portraiture is kept to an absolutely minimum, he would incorporate many figures into some of his other beach-based paintings, often capturing young children playing in the water. These types of compositions would help him to build an entirely charming oeuvre which also greatily benefited from the bright colour palettes that these types of environments would encourage him to use. He would also produce many Velazquez-inspired portraits in much darker tones that enabled him to leave behind an interesting and varied collection of work which remains highly celebrated today.