UC Riverside

In March 1909, millionaire Archer M. Huntington wrote to his mother: “Everywhere the air was full of miracle… There was eternal talk of ‘sunlight.’ Nothing like it had ever happened in New York.” The event described is the presentation of 356 paintings by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863-1923) at the Hispanic Society of America in New York City. The show was both the inaugural exhibition of Huntington’s fledgling library and museum as well as the Spanish luminist’s first in the United States. It was, furthermore, a wild success in terms of criticism, sales and sheer number of visitors.

The importance of the Hispanic Society exhibition has not escaped scholars. Yet none have deeply considered the implications of the works’ popularity with the art-going public of turn-of-the-century New York and New England. Those who have pondered the matter have culled answers from the nineteenth-century press, or related the painter’s work to larger, American art trends—specifically belated-Impressionist or “bravura-style” brushwork. I believe these methodologies have revealed the immediate reasons for Sorolla’s appeal. In other words, they highlight the explanations that viewers at the time would have been willing and able to articulate. Though valid, I argue these immediate or surface reasons are only part of the deeper narrative that the historian might elucidate. My thesis is an attempt to trace that deeper narrative, wherein fascination with Sorolla’s art is the surface manifestation of the canvases’ ability to affirm and comfort fin-de-siècle, East-Coast observers—specifically with regards to Positivism, nationalism, technology and industrial capitalism.