Calle de Sorolla

Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida was born in Valencia in 1863 and was orphaned as a child. Between his uncle’s locksmith trade and his first drawing studies, the painter took shape whom critics would come to call “the painter of light”. His canvases fixed the Mediterranean at high noon: bathers, fishing nets, water splashed under the sun. From Valencia he moved to Rome and Paris before settling in Madrid, where he built the house-studio that is now a museum. A stroke left him half-paralysed in 1920, and he died three years later in Cercedilla, in the mountains near the capital. The calle de Sorolla traces a short stretch in the Almenara neighbourhood, the old Ventilla. It is a modest street, far from the great museums of the centre. There is another glorieta del Pintor Sorolla in Chamberí; this one, in Almenara, is the neighbourhood’s.