Why Joaquín Sorolla Matters
“Nothing Like It Ever Happened in New York”
NOTES FOR A DOCUMENTARY FILM -- Nearly three centuries after the founding of New Amsterdam, America began to see Spain in a different light. The change came, in no small measure, through the paintings of a man from Valencia: Joaquín Sorolla.
To understand why his arrival in New York in 1909 mattered, we must return to the city's beginnings, when the shadows of Spain's European history first crossed the Atlantic.
The Shadows Arrive in America
The Dutch settlers who established New Amsterdam in the seventeenth century brought with them more than the customs and ambitions of their homeland. They carried the historical memory of a long struggle against Spain.
For generations, the northern provinces of the Netherlands had fought to free themselves from Spanish Habsburg rule. The Eighty Years' War, which began in 1568, had transformed Spain into a powerful adversary in the Dutch political and religious imagination.
When the English took possession of New Amsterdam in 1664 and renamed it New York, they introduced another tradition of hostility toward Spain, shaped by the Protestant Reformation, the Spanish Armada of 1588, and generations of political and religious rivalry.
Thus, long before the United States existed, two European traditions of antagonism toward Spain had converged on the island of Manhattan.
The image of Spain that would eventually take shape in America had begun its journey across the Atlantic.
An Empire on the American Continent
Yet Spain was not merely a distant European adversary. Its presence in North America preceded the founding of the English colonies and extended across territories that would eventually become part of the United States.
From Florida to the Southwest, Spanish explorers, settlers, soldiers, and missionaries established settlements, missions, and institutions whose architectural and cultural traces remain visible today.
St. Augustine, founded in 1565, was already a Spanish settlement when the English established Jamestown more than four decades later.
For British colonists, Spain represented both a competing imperial power and the Catholic monarchy against which Protestant England had long defined itself. Religious suspicion and territorial ambition reinforced one another. These attitudes did not disappear with American independence.
During the nineteenth century, Americans watched the dissolution of Spain's continental empire with a mixture of republican sympathy, commercial interest, and territorial ambition. The independence movements of Spanish America were frequently interpreted through the language of liberation from European monarchy.
Even after Mexico became independent in 1821, American perceptions of its Spanish colonial inheritance continued to influence the rhetoric surrounding territorial expansion and the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848.
Spain, in other words, remained present in the American imagination even when Spain itself was no longer the immediate adversary.
The political conflicts changed. The inherited vocabulary of suspicion proved more durable.
The Spain of Painters and Poets
But there was another Spain, one that Americans encountered not through diplomacy or warfare, but through literature, painting, architecture, and travel. It was the Spain of Velázquez, El Greco, and Goya.
Their paintings offered American collectors, artists, and intellectuals an artistic civilization of extraordinary depth. Yet admiration did not necessarily displace inherited stereotypes. The same culture that produced masterpieces could still be described through images of religious severity, violence, mystery, and decline.
The contradictions were particularly evident in the reception of Goya, whose art could be admired for its modernity and expressive power while reinforcing, for some observers, an association between Spain and suffering.
This was not an entirely imaginary Spain. Its history had indeed been marked by religious conflict, political upheaval, and imperial ambition. But it was a selective picture, shaped as much by foreign expectations as by Spanish experience.
Americans were learning to admire Spanish art without necessarily abandoning their prejudices about Spanish civilization.
Washington Irving and the Alhambra
One of the earliest and most influential American writers to offer a different vision of Spain was Washington Irving. In 1832, Irving published Tales of the Alhambra, inspired by his residence in the celebrated palace overlooking Granada.
His Spain was neither the threatening empire of Protestant polemic nor the defeated monarchy of republican history. It was a country of extraordinary architecture, layered civilizations, legends, and poetic memory.
Irving invited American readers to discover the artistic and historical richness of a culture they had often encountered through political hostility. But his vision carried its own limitations.
The Spain of the Alhambra was largely a Spain of the past: picturesque, romantic, and distant from the social and cultural realities of the nineteenth century. It encouraged admiration, but also nostalgia for a civilization whose political power had long since vanished. The Alhambra became a monument to a lost world, admired for its beauty while increasingly detached from the Islamic civilization that had created it. As successive generations peeled away the layers of history, something essential was lost: the complex cultural identity of a Spain that had once been inseparable from the wider Islamic world.
Nevertheless, something important had changed. Spain could now inspire fascination rather than fear.
The Alhambra in the American Artistic Imagination
“Give him alms, woman, for there is no sorrow in life like the sorrow of being blind in Granada.” Francisco de Icaza — The Blind Man of Granada
Irving's literary fascination with Spain found a parallel in the work of American painters and designers. Samuel Colman, who traveled to Granada in 1860, was among the artists attracted to the architecture and decorative traditions of the Alhambra. His interest in Islamic ornament, architecture, and Mediterranean landscapes contributed to a broader American appreciation of artistic traditions beyond northern Europe.
Colman would become an important influence on Louis Comfort Tiffany, whose experiments with color, glass, ornament, and light helped transform American decorative art. Tiffany's interest in the Alhambra and the visual traditions of the Mediterranean belonged to a growing American fascination with artistic cultures that had once been treated primarily as foreign or exotic.
Here was another Spain entering the American imagination: a source of beauty, invention, and artistic inspiration. Yet the distinction remained.
Irving's Granada and the Alhambra admired by American artists represented, above all, the inheritance of an extraordinary past. The question of contemporary Spain—its people, its work, its landscapes, and its living artistic culture—remained largely unresolved.
The Return of the Enemy
In 1898, the older image of Spain returned with remarkable force. The explosion of the American battleship Maine in Havana Harbor on February 15 became the emotional catalyst for a confrontation that had been building around the struggle for Cuban independence. American newspapers, political cartoons, and popular rhetoric revived familiar representations of Spain as cruel, backward, and oppressive. The cry “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!” captured the atmosphere of a country preparing for war.
The conflict lasted only a few months, but its consequences were immense. Spain lost its remaining major overseas possessions, and the United States emerged with new imperial responsibilities.
For the American public, the war also reinforced an old moral narrative: the United States as a modern nation confronting the remnants of a decaying European empire. Yet even at that moment, the relationship between Spain and America was more complicated than the slogans suggested.
In Charlottesville, Virginia, the University of Virginia's Rotunda had recently undergone reconstruction following the devastating fire of 1895.
Among those responsible for the rebuilding was Rafael Guastavino, an architect and master of structural tile vaulting born in Valencia. The reconstructed Rotunda was dedicated in June 1898, while the United States and Spain were at war. It is a revealing coincidence.
At the very moment when American newspapers were denouncing Spain, a Spanish-born innovator was helping restore one of the most symbolic buildings in American academic architecture.
The contradiction was not unusual. Political hostility toward Spain could coexist with admiration for Spanish talent, craftsmanship, and artistic achievement. America was not of one mind about Spain.
It never had been.
A Different Understanding of Spain
By the beginning of the twentieth century, a more sustained American interest in Spanish culture had begun to take institutional form. Collectors, scholars, architects, and artists were looking beyond the familiar narratives of imperial conflict and romantic decline.
Among them was Archer Milton Huntington.
Born into a wealthy American family, Huntington devoted much of his life to the study, collection, and preservation of the artistic and literary heritage of Spain and the wider Spanish-speaking world. In 1904, he founded the Hispanic Society of America in New York, envisioning an institution dedicated to a civilization whose achievements were far more extensive than the political stereotypes through which Americans had so often understood it. The Society's museum opened in 1908.
Huntington's project was significant not merely because he collected Spanish art, but because he sought to give it an institutional presence in the cultural life of the United States.
Spain would no longer be encountered exclusively through the inherited judgments of European rivals, the romantic imagination of travelers, or the sensational headlines of war. It could be studied, exhibited, and appreciated on its own terms. And Huntington understood that such an undertaking required more than the masterpieces of the past. It required the presence of living artists.
The Door Opens
By 1909, nearly three centuries had passed since the Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam carried their memories of conflict with Spain across the Atlantic. The English had added their own religious and political antagonisms. The American republic had inherited and transformed those prejudices through territorial expansion, war, and the ambitions of a rising nation. Yet another current had always existed alongside them.
There had been the admiration inspired by Velázquez, El Greco, and Goya; Washington Irving's fascination with Granada; the Alhambra's influence on American artists; and the growing determination of collectors and scholars to understand Spanish civilization beyond its political history. The American image of Spain had never been entirely dark. It had been composed in chiaroscuro. And now, at the beginning of a new century, Archer Milton Huntington was preparing to introduce New York to an artist whose paintings offered a vision of Spain unlike the images that had dominated so much of its American history.
This artist had painted the hardships of labor, the vulnerability of women, the dignity of ordinary people, and the changing light of the Mediterranean. He came not as the ambassador of a crumbling empire, nor as the custodian of a vanished civilization, but as a painter of a Spain rising from the ashes of imperial defeat.
In February 1909, the Hispanic Society of America presented his paintings at Audubon Terrace, on Broadway and 155th Street, in northern Manhattan. His name was Joaquín Sorolla. In just over four weeks, nearly 160,000 people came to see his work. And through his paintings, America was offered a new Vision of Spain.
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