It had begun, like most things, with a spark and completely by accident. For reasons unknown to myself I'd fallen into a job teaching the History of Spanish Art to American students on Erasmus programmes at the University of Cantabria in Santander. Having never taught the subject before I'd had just a week to prepare the course based on a one-sided A4 sheet briefly outlining each unit and which artists to be discussed. And there he was in unit 10 "Spanish Art in the 20th century" a name I'd never heard; Joaquin Sorolla. He was listed alongside two giants in the history of art; Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso, familiar to millions whose work was known to those with even a fleeting interest in the subject but who was this third man of seemingly equal standing as these titans of art? Over the course of the following week, and after more visits to Wikipedia than I thought humanly possible, I'd cobbled together a passable syllabus and my obsession with Sorolla had begun.
This obsession was fuelled in great part by the curious discovery that he had undertaken an epic 8-year journey around Spain creating a history of the country recorded in oils entitled 'A Vision of Spain'. My imagination ran wild. As a tenuous excuse to travel around a country I loved maybe I could embark upon the same journey 100 years on? I bought a map and began earnestly marking out locations, names and dates to put things into context. This might just work as an investigation into a people and culture. How much had Spain changed in a century? Greatly, I hazarded a guess, but in many ways maybe it hadn't. I needed to find out. An idea was born and I felt destined to see it to completion.
To put things into context, 'A Vision of Spain' was born shortly after Spanish impressionist painter Joaquin Sorolla had had his first, and hugely successful, one-man exhibition in America at the Hispanic Society in New York in 1909 (a show which drew an incredible 168,000 viewers). In 1910 he met with the Society's curator, Archer Milton Huntingdon, in Paris to discuss a commission. By the spring of following year he had accepted the project and the final contract was signed in Paris a few months later on 26th November 1911. This project was to be a huge undertaking for the 48 year-old artist and would occupy the lion's share of his final decade as a painter.
Self-portrait of Sorolla from 1909
For 'A Vision of Spain' Huntingdon had envisaged a grand exposition of Spanish culture, its landscapes, traditions and its people and costumes to be exhibited in a newly, and specifically, constructed room at the Hispanic Society. They eventually decided upon a series of paintings of the provinces of Spain where Sorolla himself would select specific locations, subjects and details. Over the next 8 years the project would take over Sorolla's life as first he scouted locations and then travelled to them with all his artist's paraphernalia; no easy task in the early part of the 20th century when many villages and towns were still isolated from paved roads and train lines.
Sorolla liked to paint en plein air, surrounded by the ever changing light that would lend his paintings a real sense of place. Any given environment infusing itself inextricably within the canvas. Logistically this was a nightmare and extremely weather dependent. The paintings themselves were also enormous measuring 3.5 metres in height and up to almost 14 metres in length meaning that special easels had to be constructed to hold them. Models were hired to feature in the paintings which meant further organisational difficulties too. I would have none of these logistical difficulties as I was setting out with just a camera and a notebook but I wanted to capture this same sense of place as Sorolla had done 100 years previously and I knew it wasn't going to be all plain sailing...