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Lot Essay
At the age of twenty-one Sorolla won a stipend from the Valencian government to further his studies in painting and in 1885 he moved to Italy. The first years of his stay in Italy he lived in Rome but after his marriage to Clotilde in 1888 he moved to Asisi. His stipend was extended and it was not until the middle of 1889 that Sorolla returned to Spain to live.
During this formative period Sorolla completed a large number of oil paintings, watercolors and small oil sketches that focused on genre subjects. These paintings found a ready market and through their sale Sorolla was able to increase his small stipend income. While it is not known exactly when Sorolla met the painter and art dealer Francisco Jover Casanova, the two became closely aligned and Jover was instrumental in many of the commissions and sales of these paintings, particularly to the Latin American market. Jover's sales are detailed in a notebook kept by his wife, presently in the collection of the Museo Sorolla, Madrid, and the notebook mentions a work likely to be the present painting as having been sold to a South American collector. So strong was the intermixing of the commercial relationship and the friendship of these two men, that Jover asked Sorolla to complete work on his own commission of La jura de la Constitucin por tha Reina Regente Mara Cristina for the Senate building when he became deathly ill.
Juerga Andaluza is remarkable for its forshaddowing of Sorolla's later Valencian subjects and, like these better known images, depicts a beautifully tiled patio. In total Sorolla painted ten compositions that were set in open-air patios between the years 1889 and 1895.
Blanca Pons Sorolla has confirmed the authenticity of this picture and will include it in her forthcoming Sorolla catalogue raisonn.
During this formative period Sorolla completed a large number of oil paintings, watercolors and small oil sketches that focused on genre subjects. These paintings found a ready market and through their sale Sorolla was able to increase his small stipend income. While it is not known exactly when Sorolla met the painter and art dealer Francisco Jover Casanova, the two became closely aligned and Jover was instrumental in many of the commissions and sales of these paintings, particularly to the Latin American market. Jover's sales are detailed in a notebook kept by his wife, presently in the collection of the Museo Sorolla, Madrid, and the notebook mentions a work likely to be the present painting as having been sold to a South American collector. So strong was the intermixing of the commercial relationship and the friendship of these two men, that Jover asked Sorolla to complete work on his own commission of La jura de la Constitucin por tha Reina Regente Mara Cristina for the Senate building when he became deathly ill.
Juerga Andaluza is remarkable for its forshaddowing of Sorolla's later Valencian subjects and, like these better known images, depicts a beautifully tiled patio. In total Sorolla painted ten compositions that were set in open-air patios between the years 1889 and 1895.
Blanca Pons Sorolla has confirmed the authenticity of this picture and will include it in her forthcoming Sorolla catalogue raisonn.