The sunny, windswept beaches of Valencia became one of Sorolla’s best-loved and most popular subjects in the years around 1900, when he achieved international acclaim in Paris. This work, one of his earliest beach scenes, was painted several years before he began to take up the motif with regularity. It followed on the heels of La vuelta de la pesca (Paris, Musée d’Orsay), a monumental canvas of bulls pulling a fishing boat through the surf. As in that painting, Sorolla has elected to represent the seaside as a place of labour rather than leisure: one fisherman stoops to inspect a wicker creel, or trap, while another looks on as a fishing vessel makes its way to shore. The brilliant, angled sunlight beating down on the two standing figures allows Sorolla to revel in depicting both full sun and deep shade. The stark white of the bending man’s shirt rhymes with the colour of the seafoam and cresting waves while the other man and his creel appear, like the bow of the boat behind, in dark-toned shadow. Sorolla first exhibited the painting at Berlin’s Grosse Kunstausstellung in 1896, where it was unanimously awarded the gold medal before being acquired for the Nationalgalerie by its innovative director, Hugo von Tschudi.
