Joaquín Sorolla – Cosienda la vela (Sewing the Sail)

Sorolla has often been described as the ‘master of light’ and like the French Impressionists, and Monet in particular, he was captivated by lambency; those moments in the day when sunlight transfigures a scene; a specific juncture when its radiance bestows on those living under it a sense of blessedness and harmony. But although concerned primarily to recreate the impression of light, painting from life en plein air, Sorolla never sacrificed his masterly draughtsmanship in its pursuit. His superb ability with compositional line was allied to his obsession with light representation and this distinctive coalescence is what marks him out as an artist.  Like Degas, he seems to be just as interested in the articulation of limbs as they move in space and as their owners are engaged unselfconsciously in their everyday activities, as he is with the effulgence they inhabit.

Joaquín Sorolla – Cosienda la vela (Sewing the Sail),1896, oil on canvas, Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, Venice

Sewing the Sail is a fine example of this. A group of five women, in all likelihood the wives of the fishermen who worked out of Valencia’s port on Spain’s east coast, seem happily engaged in their work, making or repairing a sail which is partly suspended on a rope strung from one end of the space to the other, tied between two uprights.  One figure has her right arm held aloft as she pulls the thread taut. She is looking down at her sewing but is smiling bashfully as the headscarved companion to her left and facing the viewer may have made a joke. The pink-bloused figure nearest us echoes the same arm movement, as does the seated figure in green. It’s as if the artist has noticed these arm gestures for their task-related idiosyncrasy and for the synchronicity of motion between each of them, as well as for the skill and mastery of the mission that such activity represents. They are shown like conductors of their own orchestras, brought together to perform a metaphorical concerto on a theme of white.

The painting speaks of cooperation, social interaction, common endeavour. Sorolla shows us women at work, but it is labour inflected by a jocular comradeship; the bond between the women is a simulacrum of the brotherhood that would exist between their menfolk at sea. Although the scene appears light-hearted, the work is not idealised, and its toughness is made apparent by the artist when he shows the women wearing ‘palms’ (leather shields) and thimbles, essential to force their big needles through heavy sailcloth. Sorolla finds dignity in this industriousness and the implicit muscle in the activity eschews any undue sentimentality, despite the light’s emollience. The two male figures in the scene provide a counterpoint to the women’s mobility. The bent-backed man in the straw hat holds a gather of sailcloth against his leg while the bald-headed smoking figure gestures towards the piece of sail that he touches as if giving one of the women some instruction, perhaps having just risen from the chair shown behind him.

This is a curiously indoor-outdoor space, a veranda or pergola attached to a building, whose unseen beams admit dappled sunlight that illuminates the cloth through the foliage (including a vine at top right) and flowers that adorn the space - climbing the trellis on the left, the wall at the rear and in the pots on the right. This floral abundance tells us that this is summertime but also that while these people may be poor, their lives are similarly seasoned and flourishing. The line of the rope and the progression of the blue-painted supports to the building lend structure and strong perspectival depth. This treatment situates these figures on a vector that would seldom deviate from the sea, in a locale where they belong, where they have some dominion, where their progress in life, however circumscribed and humble, is honestly lived and has value. Through the open door at the rear, the coastline can be seen and the faint outline of a beached fishing vessel, tilted at an angle, its mast bereft of sail until the women’s work is done.

The whites of the bunched material in the centre foreground are rendered with a combination of colours in among which actual white is used pretty sparingly. Look closely at the ‘white’ sail and you can see ochre, umber, pink, green and sky blue, and tellingly, mauve. That shade reminds me of the bluey-mauve used by Monet to create shadow in The Magpie, with its remarkable exaggeration of colour contrast, the scientific basis for which had been outlined by the great chemist Michel Chevreul back in 1839. His optical effect theories were also enthusiastically embraced by the likes of Van Gogh, Pissarro and Seurat.

Claude Monet, The Magpie (1868-69), oil on canvas, Musee d'Orsay, Paris

All the ‘simultaneous contrast’ colours in Sewing the Sail, colours which are juxtapositions rather than mixtures, serve to shape the fullness and random folds of the workpiece. They amplify the idea that there is intricacy and complexity in this manual labour, and the entanglement of these shades may be contrasted in the mind’s eye with the more uniform white of a sail on a boat with the wind behind it. Here, the simple latent energy of the sail has been stilled and deliberately disordered so that the women may work to make it good once more. Their competence and efficiency will get it sorted.

The composition is masterly. The enfiladed vista is highlighted by the angles of those various arms, the tilt of the straw hat and the red sash, the dilapidated pickets, all of which draw the eye into the work where any deviations from its essential symmetry only syncopate its rhythm. But of course, it is the depiction of the play of light that adds its own tinkling cadence and heightens the sense of geniality in the endeavour. The figures are working in the partial shade and relative coolness provided by structure and the plant growth, but some sunshine is filtered through it nevertheless, its deflected rays further animating an already animated collective scene, dialling up its sense of immediacy, its ‘in the moment’ delight. Light is thereby equated to vitality. There are many beautiful ‘moments’ of light within the work, most obviously as it dances on the sail, but also as it catches raised forearms, foreheads, noses and chins.

This depiction of sewing is also a painting that has threaded together female fellowship, the shared intimacy of physical labour and the idea that these women are making an essential contribution to their families’ livelihoods. Theirs is an unchanging, simple and authentic existence that Sorolla does not patronise but celebrates. The painting conveys the feeling that they toil cheerfully under the benediction of enchanting, scintillant light, each stitch further fastening together not just the sail but the fabric of an abiding way of life.  The artist must have felt deeply simpatico with these women as he watched them at work, while he laid down pigment onto his own canvas cloth, bringing it to life just as they would soon see their sail set and filled in pursuit of the next catch.