Joaquín Sorolla in Granada

On February 7, 1917, Joaquín Sorolla wrote from Granada to his wife, Clotilde, in Madrid, as he did almost every other day while he travelled across Spain. These were the years of Vision of Spain, the commission Archer Huntington had given him for the Hispanic Society of America in New York. His letters, now kept at the Museo Sorolla in Madrid, let us follow those journeys day by day, often against the clock.

That morning he had been painting at the Alhambra. Granada is not one of the fourteen panels on Audubon Terrace, and I don't yet know why. Americans had known the Alhambra since Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra in1832, so it would have been the most familiar Spanish image he could have given them. Perhaps that was the problem. Sorolla had steered Huntington away from a painted history of Spain and toward the people of its regions in his own time, and Irving's Alhambra belongs to the past. Perhaps there were other reasons. I also can't say whether this trip was part of the commission work or something else; the letter mentions the King's hunt at La Angorilla and nothing about the panels.

What I can say is that he painted the Alhambra anyway, facing a north wall at five degrees below zero. This is what he wrote that afternoon.

Granada, February 7, 1917

Dear Clotilde,

It was five below zero yesterday at nine in the morning, so I had my share of suffering. Today the sky is clear, but the cold is even worse than yesterday. My hands are numb and I can't stop shivering.

The sierra is beautiful, without a single cloud over it, but the cold is terrible. I spent the morning at the Alhambra and began a large study of the Court of the Myrtles, but the wall I am painting faces north, and I suffered enormously.

One must come to Granada in summer. I can barely write, even after devouring my lunch, taking coffee on the terrace and smoking a splendid cigar. It's no use; it seems that if I am made of iron, it is iron that needs to be put to the fire.

The Alhambra staff admire my endurance, but all I know is that to be a painter my way, one has to be mad, or else the others are madder for not living in nature, devoted as they are to manufacturing old and stupid conventions. But let's not talk about that; I am not going to straighten such a crooked tree.

Today is a day like the ones at La Angorilla. (La Angorilla: a hunting estate in the province of Seville, where Sorolla had recently been at a hunt attended by King Alfonso XIII. The "Duke" who sent the hare to Clotilde is not named in the letter.)

The King shot a hare in front of me. That hare has a story, and it is surely the one the Duke sent you. The King took it for dead and picked it up by the ears, but as soon as it was free and lying on the ground, apparently dead for a few seconds, it shot off with such fury that it had to be chased down, with a keeper on horseback riding at full gallop.

Yesterday I received two letters from you, so I suppose the same has happened to you with mine.

Keep well, and tell my son that the sierra is clear, and that there are trains leaving Madrid in the morning at nine or ten that arrive in Granada at the same hour at night.

A thousand kisses to all from your

Joaquín