He was once a famous Spanish master, who took first
Spain, then Europe, then America by storm. Unfortunately,
much like his countryman and contemporary Enrique Granados,
Sorolla lived and worked when the currents of modernism
were roiling the art world around the turn of the 20th
century.
Early in his life Sorolla was seen as a realist radical,
an innovator in plein air techniques who dared to paint
ordinary people (even, as in Sad Inheritance, cripples);
late in his life he was seen as a realist reactionary,
stubbornly clinging to an outmoded style in the time
of cubism, expressionism, and the triumph of modernism.
