València in Spain is well known in art from the dozens of paintings of well-dressed young ladies on its beaches, made by Joaquín Sorolla during the early years of the twentieth century. This weekend I look at how his art evolved from his earlier works of social realism to reach the brightly lit beach.

Sorolla was born in València in 1863, and started learning to draw and paint at the age of nine. Among his teachers when he was studying in his home town was another Valèncian, Ignacio Pinazo Camarlench (1849-1916), who had developed a loose Impressionist style in 1874.

In 1887, shortly after Pinazo stopped teaching at the Academy, he painted one of the earliest depictions of Malvarrosa Beach, the most popular in València, a painting almost certainly seen by the young Sorolla.

Sorolla would also have seen and been influenced by the paintings of Francisco Pradilla (1848-1921) from Zaragoza, a history painter who had been Director of the Academy of Spain in Rome, and Enrique Simonet (1866-1927), another Valèncian.

Simonet must have painted his Málaga Beach at Dusk when he was back in Spain during a visit from his studies in Rome in 1889. It shows well his increasing attention to detail which was taking him away from his early Impressionist style.

By the 1890s, although working primarily in Madrid, Sorolla began to use the fishermen of València as a source of motifs. Early among those is this man Peeling Potatoes (1891) in one of the fishing boats hauled up just above the sea on the beach there. Relatively small and quite sketchy, this may have been a study he intended to develop into a larger more finished work.

Sorolla’s And They Still Say Fish is Expensive! from 1894 is set in the hold of one of the larger fishing vessels, amid spare tackle, a large barrel, and some of its catch. Two older men are attending to a youth, who appears to have been wounded, presumably as the result of an accident at sea. Around the boy’s neck is a pendant good-luck charm; he is stripped to the waist and pale, and one of the men is pressing a dressing against his abdomen. Lit from an open hatch at the top left, the painting has the immediacy of a photographic snapshot and looks documentary.

Sorolla’s title is incisive social comment about the values of a society that was happy to see young boys go to sea to fish, putting their lives at risk for those ashore to enjoy cheap seafood. This was painted during the summer of 1894, again in València, and went on to great acclaim in the Paris Salon the following year, where it was bought for the Museo del Prado in Madrid.

At the same time that he was painting that work, Sorolla was busy on his even larger Return from Fishing (1894), now one of the most visually impressive exhibits in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, following its purchase for the French state from the Salon of 1895, where it won a gold medal. Romantic though this may appear today, it’s a carefully detailed account of the complex, strenuous, dangerous and above all primitive working conditions of the local fishermen of València, who still used teams of oxen to haul their boats up the beach.

Valencian Fishermen (1895) is perhaps a little more relaxed, and a far smaller essay on the work of the fishermen as they maintain their gear at the water’s edge.

Although known primarily for his portraits and figurative works, Sorolla painted some fine landscapes, which may have had a more personal significance. The Cape of San Antonio, Jávea from 1896 shows this part of the southern end of the Gulf of Valencia, here from Cap Marti to the south.

Sorolla’s best-known painting from this Naturalist period is his large Sad Inheritance (1899), which won him the Grand Prix and medal of honour at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, and a medal in Madrid the following year. As ever, its apparent spontaneity is deceptive: this is one of his most carefully prepared paintings.

It shows a group of young boys from a local charitable hospital enjoying a visit to the sea in the care of a lone priest, and celebrates the mission of the Hospitaller Order of St John of God, who had built the hospital in 1892 at the end of Malvarrosa Beach (Platja de la Malva-rosa). Sorolla later said that he had witnessed this scene one evening in a remote corner of the beach, and once he had been given permission to paint the boys, he made an initial oil sketch from memory.

Although Sad Inheritance was Sorolla’s last large Naturalist painting, he continued to create works in similar style. Lunch on the Boat, painted the previous year, shows a group of Valèncian men and boys eating an improvised lunch under the awning on their fishing boat.