Andrés Hurtado didn’t go to Seville in search of art. He was there for a few days’ sightseeing and, on Saturday at around 16:30, in the kind of unforgiving heat that gives the city its reputation, he stumbled across something lying on the pavement that caught his eye for the least artistic of reasons: the frame.
“I saw some lads dump a painting in the street.” And he thought: “What a cool frame.” “To be honest, I didn’t even look at the painting, I just took it up to the hotel with me,” local media quote him as saying. He walked off with it, literally, in a shopping bag he had bought in an Asian bazaar, without realising that he had just rescued an original Sorolla that its owners had forgotten in the middle of a lightning-fast move to their beach house.
