The Pink Robe. After the Bath, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida

The Pink Robe. After the Bath, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida

The frequent description of Sorolla as ‘the painter of light’ is fully justified in this mature work, one of his most important paintings. Inside a beach hut near the water’s edge, the woman is helping the girl to change out of a pink robe still wet from her recent bathe. The sunlight reflected onto the white material to the right and left floods the scene with light, while the figures are outlined against the background of the reed screen and the beach. The sunlight overhead is filtered through a reed awning, which is out of sight, but casts a dappled shade on both figures.
As in other paintings by the artist, the scene here transmits an intense feeling of physical well-being, the spontaneous delight of the bounty of nature, the water, the sea breeze and the sun; and of the intense pleasure the artist finds in observing, discovering and capturing on canvas the fleeting and shifting changes in the light.