A painting by Joaquín Sorolla, the Spanish artist renowned for his mastery of light, is on public show for the first time since it disappeared after being sold to a private collector 134 years ago.
Paris Boulevard, which was painted by Sorolla during a visit to the French capital between 1889 and 1890, shows a bustling cafe as dusk falls on the city. Its creator – who was more usually associated with bright and limpid Mediterranean beach scenes – makes a cameo in the work, smoking a cigar while seated at a table with a soldier.
The picture is one of 77 paintings that make up an exhibition at the Royal Collections gallery in Madrid titled Sorolla, One Hundred Years of Modernity.
“The piece immortalises one of the countless Parisian boulevard cafes and the flow of the crowds in the city,” the gallery said in a statement. “Sorolla presented the work at the 1890 National Exhibition, where its singular nature immediately set it apart from the Spanish painting of the period.”
That same year, the painting was sold to a private individual and it dropped out of sight for more than a century.
“All the experts thought it had disappeared, but a feat of investigation turned up some most unexpected results,” Ana de la Cueva, the president of Spain’s national heritage institution, Patrimonio Nacional, told Antena 3 TV. “It was still in the hands of the family who bought it back then and they have allowed us to exhibit it.”
Blanca Pons-Sorolla, who as well as being one of the curators of the exhibition is also the artist’s great-granddaughter, said: “The panoramic composition of the work – which is very photographic and which doesn’t worry about the figures who are cut off at each end – really grabs your attention and gives it a freshness that’s a taste of what Sorolla would go on to do more emphatically.
“The drawing is very accurate, the brush strokes restrained and the details have a real virtuosity that defines the more careful and defined painting of his early works.”
• Sorolla, One Hundred Years of Modernity is at the Royal Collections Gallery in Madrid until 25 February 2025.
