The White Boat, Jávea

Joaquin Sorolla is famous in Europe and America for his exquisite portrait designs and landscape paintings. His inspiration was nature, history, and social impact.

He is associated with the impressionism and Luminism era in art, where colour and articulation dictated the style of painting. For over 60 years, Joaquin wowed his peers with colour paintings of people and events in his home town in Valencia. The painting, The White Boat, shows two naked boys halfway immersed in water, hanging on a white boat. They seem to enjoy the ordeal. The foreground is covered with water, believed to be the Coast of Valencia along the Mediterranean Sea. The reflection of the blue waters affirms the bright sky, much to the joy of the little boys. It is an oil painting done on canvas. It measured 150 centimetres long and 105 centimetres high. The White Boat, Javea seemed like a perfect name for the painting, thanks to the colours of buildings and beaches along the Valencia coast. Its reflection in water breaks the blue watercolor, and the brown boys hanging on it. The painting was painted and commissioned in 1905.

Other pictures inspired by the City of Valencia were The Port of Valencia (1882), The Nereids (1886), The Net (1893), Return from Fishing (1894), The Study for The Comeback of the Fisheries (1894) and the On the Coast of Valencia (1898) among others. Paintings of children on the beach included the Sad Inheritance (1899) and Children on the Seashore (1903). His first encounter with art and painting was at 9 years. Salustiano Asenjo and Cayetano Capuz were his early teachers. He moved to Madrid, where he honed his skills at the Prado Museum, the National Museum of Art in Spain. After that, he moved to Rome, where he learned from Francisco Pradilla and to Paris, where he met Jules Bastien-Lepage and Adolf von Menzel. In all his travels (additionally to Lisbon), he received painting accolades as the Favourite Son of Valencia.

Besides landscape painting, he did portraits of famous people, among them the 27th President of the United States, William Howard Taft, and King Alfonso, the XIII, the King of Spain. He inspired painters such as Alberto Pla y Rubio and Julio de Torres, fondly known as the Sorollista. Joaquin's work is spread around Europe and America. Among his last paintings were donated to the public to form the Museo Sorolla.