Three Sails. Oil on Canvas. 1903.
Joaquin Sorolla y
Bastida painted Las Tres Velas (Three Sails) on the beach of El Cabañal
during the summer of 1903. One of the most luminously eloquent of his
many images of the fisherwomen of his native Valencia, Las Tres Velas
marks Sorolla's artistic passage to a new level of creativity. Sorolla
was already one of the world's most honored painters when he launched
his 1903 campaign of open-air painting among the fishing communities on
Spain's Mediterranean coast, but in the course of that summer Sorolla
pushed his art to a new monumentality and laid claim to a broad new
palette of color effects. Lost from public view for a century, Las Tres
Velas consolidates a decade of Sorolla's painting experience into an
unforgettable image of the womenfolk of his beloved homeland.
The asymmetry of Sorolla's eye-catching composition immediately
announces the distinctive ambition of Las Tres Velas: three barefoot
women of different ages, pulling together as they walk against the wind,
are juxtaposed with a sweeping, open line of billowing sails on
low-slung fishing skiffs that lumber into shore. Well beyond the
picture's edge, the women's progress will intersect with the returning
boats, but it is only the empty baskets, swinging awkwardly over the
oldest woman's forearms, that connects their purpose to the distant
fishing fleet. The very emptiness of the open shore spreading across the
lower right corner of the painting emphasizes the unswerving advance of
the fisherwomen who know their way without a glance to the boats. Wind
snaps their patterned scarves and twists their aprons against their
legs; the damp breeze glosses the rude wicker with prismatic color; and
the early morning sunlight glances off a feature or a texture with
little regard for form or beauty, yet each of the women has her own age,
her own identity.
One of Sorolla's most ambitious early successes with the theme of the
sea La vuelta de la pesca or Bringing in the Catch (Buenos Aires, Museo
Nacional) offers a telling comparison to Las Tres Velas. Virtually every
Valencian motif to which Sorolla would later return -- billowing sails,
brawny oxen, colorfully dressed women, dancing children, and long,
streaking shadows -- is introduced in this expansive seascape of about
1897-98. Sorolla's skill at orchestrating color and in marrying complex
figural groups is shown to good advantage in La vuelta de la pesca, but
the painting gives little indication of the particular gifts that would
soon set Sorolla well apart from the vast troupe of marine painters
working throughout Europe.
By 1901, once again in Valencia, Sorolla took up a subject from the
right hand side of the earlier painting, creating Las Sardineras (see
fig. 2), a group of women gathered around a tub of fish and the fishwife
offering them for sale. Moving his figures well up in the foreground,
emphasizing their huddled, pressing eagerness with a jumble of similar
baskets, and weaving soft lavendar tints and and acidic green-browns
into the prevailing blue and orange color scheme that pulls the women,
the sea and the beach into harmony, Sorolla firmly staked a claim to a
more sophisticated artistry that would bring so much grace and power to
his many subsequent scenes of Valencian fishing life. Finally, in 1903
with Las Tres Velas and perhaps a dozen further seascapes, Sorolla began
to make the air and wind, the water and light of Valencia, leading
actors as prominent in his paintings as his fisherwomen or bathers;
Sorolla's achievement as a profoundly modern master of a realism
tempered by abstraction was complete.
Sorolla exhibited Las Tres Velas in the Berlin international exhibition
of 1904, the last time it would be seen publicly for a century (a black
and white photograph in the Sorolla family archives kept the painting's
existence on record). Either during the exhibition or shortly
thereafter, Las Tres Velas was acquired by Max Steinthal, then one of
Berlin's leading bankers. During the mid-1890s, Steinthal and his wife
Fanny had built a magnificent home in Charlottenburg, a fashionable,
parklike section of Berlin and throughout the first decade of the
twentieth-century they built up a collection of both modern and old
master paintings displayed throughout the house. Las Tres Velas can be
seen hanging above Steinthal's desk in an undated family photo.
Steinthal's talents as a financier were as precocious as Sorolla's as a
painter: he had been a director of the Deutsche Bank since his early
twenties and made an enduring mark on his native city by structuring the
complex financing to build Berlin's underground and elevated railways.
Steinthal continued to serve the Deutsche Bank as a director well into
his eighties, until Nazi proscriptions forced him, as a Jew, to resign
in 1939. Soon thereafter, the Steinthals were obliged to sell their home
at 119 Uhlanstrasse. Although their sizable family of children and
grandchildren escaped the worst of the Nazi persecution, Max and Fanny
Steinthal chose to live out the last years of their lives in a hotel in
Berlin, dying in 1940 and 1941 respectively, just before they were
slated for deportation to a concentration camp. Little of their former
life remained to them in those dire years, but Fanny was able to prevent
the seizure of their art collection by transferring the works to one of
her sons-in-law, a non-Jew, who managed to move the paintings, drawings
and prints out of Berlin to Dresden. When that son-in-law, however,
chose to flee East Germany following the closure of that sector after
the war, he had to leave the crated Steinthal paintings behind. Seized
by the GDR as property of a state enemy, the paintings were stored in
the basement of the Dresden Gemäldegalerie and forgotten for fifty
years. Only with the catastrophic flooding of the Elbe River during the
summer of 2002 which threatened much of the artwork and apparatus stored
throughout the lower reaches of the Gemäldegalerie complex did the
crates come back to light. Through the provenance studies taking place
at the museum, the paintings were ultimately returned to the far-flung
descendants of Max and Fanny Steinthal.
More Information: http://artdaily.com/news/24130/The-Three-Sails-by-Joaquin-Sorolla-Expected-to-Sell-for-3-to-4-Million-USD-at-Sotheby-s#.UfSgRFO9z6U[/url]
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The differing ages of the three women from Valencia, the asymmetrical layout between the huddled women and the evenly distributed boats, and the intersecting lines against the wind that can be drawn where the women and the boats will meet outside of the painting make this, for me, a wonderful painting. And then there is the baby in the mother's arms, head wrapped in that red cloth that reminds me of the color of a sun that might shine over a much more violent ocean than the one depicted here. The baskets the women carry are empty, the boats are full, but we know this is soon to change. The young woman and the old look down and ahead, the former to perform these first duties of labor, the latter having done them all her life. And the mother looks out at us, a midpoint between youth and age. I almost want her to stop, to let the other two pass, and to come closer. I want to talk to her, and hear her child laugh. But she must go along the beach to meet her destiny.
Joaquin Sorolla y
Bastida painted Las Tres Velas (Three Sails) on the beach of El Cabañal
during the summer of 1903. One of the most luminously eloquent of his
many images of the fisherwomen of his native Valencia, Las Tres Velas
marks Sorolla's artistic passage to a new level of creativity. Sorolla
was already one of the world's most honored painters when he launched
his 1903 campaign of open-air painting among the fishing communities on
Spain's Mediterranean coast, but in the course of that summer Sorolla
pushed his art to a new monumentality and laid claim to a broad new
palette of color effects. Lost from public view for a century, Las Tres
Velas consolidates a decade of Sorolla's painting experience into an
unforgettable image of the womenfolk of his beloved homeland.
The asymmetry of Sorolla's eye-catching composition immediately
announces the distinctive ambition of Las Tres Velas: three barefoot
women of different ages, pulling together as they walk against the wind,
are juxtaposed with a sweeping, open line of billowing sails on
low-slung fishing skiffs that lumber into shore. Well beyond the
picture's edge, the women's progress will intersect with the returning
boats, but it is only the empty baskets, swinging awkwardly over the
oldest woman's forearms, that connects their purpose to the distant
fishing fleet. The very emptiness of the open shore spreading across the
lower right corner of the painting emphasizes the unswerving advance of
the fisherwomen who know their way without a glance to the boats. Wind
snaps their patterned scarves and twists their aprons against their
legs; the damp breeze glosses the rude wicker with prismatic color; and
the early morning sunlight glances off a feature or a texture with
little regard for form or beauty, yet each of the women has her own age,
her own identity.
One of Sorolla's most ambitious early successes with the theme of the
sea La vuelta de la pesca or Bringing in the Catch (Buenos Aires, Museo
Nacional) offers a telling comparison to Las Tres Velas. Virtually every
Valencian motif to which Sorolla would later return -- billowing sails,
brawny oxen, colorfully dressed women, dancing children, and long,
streaking shadows -- is introduced in this expansive seascape of about
1897-98. Sorolla's skill at orchestrating color and in marrying complex
figural groups is shown to good advantage in La vuelta de la pesca, but
the painting gives little indication of the particular gifts that would
soon set Sorolla well apart from the vast troupe of marine painters
working throughout Europe.
By 1901, once again in Valencia, Sorolla took up a subject from the
right hand side of the earlier painting, creating Las Sardineras (see
fig. 2), a group of women gathered around a tub of fish and the fishwife
offering them for sale. Moving his figures well up in the foreground,
emphasizing their huddled, pressing eagerness with a jumble of similar
baskets, and weaving soft lavendar tints and and acidic green-browns
into the prevailing blue and orange color scheme that pulls the women,
the sea and the beach into harmony, Sorolla firmly staked a claim to a
more sophisticated artistry that would bring so much grace and power to
his many subsequent scenes of Valencian fishing life. Finally, in 1903
with Las Tres Velas and perhaps a dozen further seascapes, Sorolla began
to make the air and wind, the water and light of Valencia, leading
actors as prominent in his paintings as his fisherwomen or bathers;
Sorolla's achievement as a profoundly modern master of a realism
tempered by abstraction was complete.
Sorolla exhibited Las Tres Velas in the Berlin international exhibition
of 1904, the last time it would be seen publicly for a century (a black
and white photograph in the Sorolla family archives kept the painting's
existence on record). Either during the exhibition or shortly
thereafter, Las Tres Velas was acquired by Max Steinthal, then one of
Berlin's leading bankers. During the mid-1890s, Steinthal and his wife
Fanny had built a magnificent home in Charlottenburg, a fashionable,
parklike section of Berlin and throughout the first decade of the
twentieth-century they built up a collection of both modern and old
master paintings displayed throughout the house. Las Tres Velas can be
seen hanging above Steinthal's desk in an undated family photo.
Steinthal's talents as a financier were as precocious as Sorolla's as a
painter: he had been a director of the Deutsche Bank since his early
twenties and made an enduring mark on his native city by structuring the
complex financing to build Berlin's underground and elevated railways.
Steinthal continued to serve the Deutsche Bank as a director well into
his eighties, until Nazi proscriptions forced him, as a Jew, to resign
in 1939. Soon thereafter, the Steinthals were obliged to sell their home
at 119 Uhlanstrasse. Although their sizable family of children and
grandchildren escaped the worst of the Nazi persecution, Max and Fanny
Steinthal chose to live out the last years of their lives in a hotel in
Berlin, dying in 1940 and 1941 respectively, just before they were
slated for deportation to a concentration camp. Little of their former
life remained to them in those dire years, but Fanny was able to prevent
the seizure of their art collection by transferring the works to one of
her sons-in-law, a non-Jew, who managed to move the paintings, drawings
and prints out of Berlin to Dresden. When that son-in-law, however,
chose to flee East Germany following the closure of that sector after
the war, he had to leave the crated Steinthal paintings behind. Seized
by the GDR as property of a state enemy, the paintings were stored in
the basement of the Dresden Gemäldegalerie and forgotten for fifty
years. Only with the catastrophic flooding of the Elbe River during the
summer of 2002 which threatened much of the artwork and apparatus stored
throughout the lower reaches of the Gemäldegalerie complex did the
crates come back to light. Through the provenance studies taking place
at the museum, the paintings were ultimately returned to the far-flung
descendants of Max and Fanny Steinthal.
More Information: http://artdaily.com/news/24130/The-Three-Sails-by-Joaquin-Sorolla-Expected-to-Sell-for-3-to-4-Million-USD-at-Sotheby-s#.UfSgRFO9z6U[/url]
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More Information: http://artdaily.com/news/24130/The-Three-Sails-by-Joaquin-Sorolla-Expected-to-Sell-for-3-to-4-Million-USD-at-Sotheby-s#.UfSgRFO9z6U[/url]
Copyright © artdaily.org
Joaquin Sorolla y
Bastida painted Las Tres Velas (Three Sails) on the beach of El Cabañal
during the summer of 1903. One of the most luminously eloquent of his
many images of the fisherwomen of his native Valencia, Las Tres Velas
marks Sorolla's artistic passage to a new level of creativity. Sorolla
was already one of the world's most honored painters when he launched
his 1903 campaign of open-air painting among the fishing communities on
Spain's Mediterranean coast, but in the course of that summer Sorolla
pushed his art to a new monumentality and laid claim to a broad new
palette of color effects. Lost from public view for a century, Las Tres
Velas consolidates a decade of Sorolla's painting experience into an
unforgettable image of the womenfolk of his beloved homeland.
The asymmetry of Sorolla's eye-catching composition immediately
announces the distinctive ambition of Las Tres Velas: three barefoot
women of different ages, pulling together as they walk against the wind,
are juxtaposed with a sweeping, open line of billowing sails on
low-slung fishing skiffs that lumber into shore. Well beyond the
picture's edge, the women's progress will intersect with the returning
boats, but it is only the empty baskets, swinging awkwardly over the
oldest woman's forearms, that connects their purpose to the distant
fishing fleet. The very emptiness of the open shore spreading across the
lower right corner of the painting emphasizes the unswerving advance of
the fisherwomen who know their way without a glance to the boats. Wind
snaps their patterned scarves and twists their aprons against their
legs; the damp breeze glosses the rude wicker with prismatic color; and
the early morning sunlight glances off a feature or a texture with
little regard for form or beauty, yet each of the women has her own age,
her own identity.
One of Sorolla's most ambitious early successes with the theme of the
sea La vuelta de la pesca or Bringing in the Catch (Buenos Aires, Museo
Nacional) offers a telling comparison to Las Tres Velas. Virtually every
Valencian motif to which Sorolla would later return -- billowing sails,
brawny oxen, colorfully dressed women, dancing children, and long,
streaking shadows -- is introduced in this expansive seascape of about
1897-98. Sorolla's skill at orchestrating color and in marrying complex
figural groups is shown to good advantage in La vuelta de la pesca, but
the painting gives little indication of the particular gifts that would
soon set Sorolla well apart from the vast troupe of marine painters
working throughout Europe.
By 1901, once again in Valencia, Sorolla took up a subject from the
right hand side of the earlier painting, creating Las Sardineras (see
fig. 2), a group of women gathered around a tub of fish and the fishwife
offering them for sale. Moving his figures well up in the foreground,
emphasizing their huddled, pressing eagerness with a jumble of similar
baskets, and weaving soft lavendar tints and and acidic green-browns
into the prevailing blue and orange color scheme that pulls the women,
the sea and the beach into harmony, Sorolla firmly staked a claim to a
more sophisticated artistry that would bring so much grace and power to
his many subsequent scenes of Valencian fishing life. Finally, in 1903
with Las Tres Velas and perhaps a dozen further seascapes, Sorolla began
to make the air and wind, the water and light of Valencia, leading
actors as prominent in his paintings as his fisherwomen or bathers;
Sorolla's achievement as a profoundly modern master of a realism
tempered by abstraction was complete.
Sorolla exhibited Las Tres Velas in the Berlin international exhibition
of 1904, the last time it would be seen publicly for a century (a black
and white photograph in the Sorolla family archives kept the painting's
existence on record). Either during the exhibition or shortly
thereafter, Las Tres Velas was acquired by Max Steinthal, then one of
Berlin's leading bankers. During the mid-1890s, Steinthal and his wife
Fanny had built a magnificent home in Charlottenburg, a fashionable,
parklike section of Berlin and throughout the first decade of the
twentieth-century they built up a collection of both modern and old
master paintings displayed throughout the house. Las Tres Velas can be
seen hanging above Steinthal's desk in an undated family photo.
Steinthal's talents as a financier were as precocious as Sorolla's as a
painter: he had been a director of the Deutsche Bank since his early
twenties and made an enduring mark on his native city by structuring the
complex financing to build Berlin's underground and elevated railways.
Steinthal continued to serve the Deutsche Bank as a director well into
his eighties, until Nazi proscriptions forced him, as a Jew, to resign
in 1939. Soon thereafter, the Steinthals were obliged to sell their home
at 119 Uhlanstrasse. Although their sizable family of children and
grandchildren escaped the worst of the Nazi persecution, Max and Fanny
Steinthal chose to live out the last years of their lives in a hotel in
Berlin, dying in 1940 and 1941 respectively, just before they were
slated for deportation to a concentration camp. Little of their former
life remained to them in those dire years, but Fanny was able to prevent
the seizure of their art collection by transferring the works to one of
her sons-in-law, a non-Jew, who managed to move the paintings, drawings
and prints out of Berlin to Dresden. When that son-in-law, however,
chose to flee East Germany following the closure of that sector after
the war, he had to leave the crated Steinthal paintings behind. Seized
by the GDR as property of a state enemy, the paintings were stored in
the basement of the Dresden Gemäldegalerie and forgotten for fifty
years. Only with the catastrophic flooding of the Elbe River during the
summer of 2002 which threatened much of the artwork and apparatus stored
throughout the lower reaches of the Gemäldegalerie complex did the
crates come back to light. Through the provenance studies taking place
at the museum, the paintings were ultimately returned to the far-flung
descendants of Max and Fanny Steinthal.
More Information: http://artdaily.com/news/24130/The-Three-Sails-by-Joaquin-Sorolla-Expected-to-Sell-for-3-to-4-Million-USD-at-Sotheby-s#.UfSgRFO9z6U[/url]
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More Information: http://artdaily.com/news/24130/The-Three-Sails-by-Joaquin-Sorolla-Expected-to-Sell-for-3-to-4-Million-USD-at-Sotheby-s#.UfSgRFO9z6U[/url]
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