Joaquín Sorolla (1863–1923) was a Spanish painter of extraordinary technical facility, best known for his luminous depictions of the Mediterranean coast — white sails, brilliant sunlight, children playing at the water's edge — rendered in a palette of such intense clarity that it seems to generate its own light. Born in Valencia and trained in Rome and Paris, he became one of the most celebrated painters in Europe and America at the turn of the twentieth century, receiving a triumphant reception from critics and collectors on both sides of the Atlantic. His large-scale decorative commission for the Hispanic Society of America in New York — fourteen panels depicting the provinces and peoples of Spain, completed between 1912 and 1919 — remains one of the most ambitious single undertakings in the history of decorative painting. Sorolla worked with tremendous physical energy, outdoors in full sunlight, often on canvases of enormous scale, and the joy of that engagement is entirely legible in the finished work.