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.
