OF SATURDAY 1 ON SUNDAY 30/4
TOWN HALL SQUARE
registrations (maximum 2 people): [email protected]
The cultural route The Valencia of Joaquín Sorolla promoted by Valencia City Council begins with a warning: in the background, Sorolla did not live too long in Valencia, he came to Madrid looking for projection after having gone on scholarship to Rome at the age of twenty and consequently his legacy in the city is not extensive. knowing this, this route will take you on a visit to the corners that played a role in the life of the Valencian master of light in the company of an educated and passionate guide. It starts at the Town Hall Square because it was here, in the current headquarters of the Treasury, where Sorolla had his first workshop, above the photography studio of Antonio García Peris. His future father-in-law saw the young man's artistic potential as a result of his work illuminating photographs with color, a very common technique at the time. He was the first to buy a Sorolla, a still life that has little to do with the light-filled paintings that made him universally famous.
Sorolla was orphaned at an early age and was adopted together with his sister Concheta by his uncles, neighbors of the current Don Juan de Austria Street, zone of cultural effervescence where the Teatro Apolo stood, the newspaper The village and the School of Artisans where the young Ximet took his first artistic steps. Here, at the crossroads between Don Juan de Austria and Joaquín Sorolla street, there is the plaque that the city council dedicated to the painter during his lifetime after naming him his favorite son. The drawing on the plaque is by Sorolla himself and was sculpted by another favorite son and great friend, Mariano Benlliure. The third of the group was Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, to whom Clotilde, Sorolla's wife, I couldn't see with good eyes. Clotilde is going to be a donut, musa, psychologist and instigator, the great love and engine of his life. They got married in the Royal Parish of Sant Martí Bisbe and Sant Antoni Abat which is hidden at the beginning of Carrer Sant Vicent, another stop on the route.
You will have previously seen the old El Iris building from Carrer poeta Querol, a fleeting Valencian bourgeois recreational society of the 19th century that awarded a Sorolla de 17 years the silver medal for the work Moro stalking the opportunity for his revenge. You will also pass through Carrer de les Mantes (before, Carrer del Camisers) where the painter was born, This is announced by a plaque placed by the Falla Plaça Lope de Vega. Sorolla does not have an official plaque from the town hall in his birthplace, Blasco and Benlliure yes. And from here to the Market, on the steps of which the haymaker Vicent Domènech called for revolution against Napoleon, scene that embodied a Sorolla of 20 years in The cry of the Palleter to win the long-awaited painting pension from the Provincial Council to go to Rome that we mentioned before. The visit ends at the Center del Carme, the old Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Sant Carles where the painter studied, but before that you will stop at the Valldigna portal depicted in painting d’Father Jofré defending a madman painted in Assisi in Byzantine style and that red pigment made with lead that caused so many health problems to painters like Goya or Sorolla himself. The Valencian, Besides, he smoked a lot, and the commission of the Hispanic Society of America to paint different regions of the Iberian Peninsula for the series Vision of Spain forced him to go around in a cart from here to there, a titanic job to which he dedicated four years and which ended up ruining his health. He would die four years after finishing the last painting of La Hispanic, becoming the most important Valencian painter of all time, to whom 2023 tribute is paid to him for the centenary of his death with this cultural route and a handful of exhibitions. S.M.
