Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida's Otra Margarita Explained
Learn more about Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida's Otra Margarita.
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Transcript
Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida painted mostly historical and social realist works, one of which became his first great success, in 1892: Otra Margarita, a large oil painting featuring a young woman in a polka dot dress on a train, handcuffed and accompanied by two guards. Though her head is down, one of her eyes is visible and startlingly wide open.
Sorolla based the painting on a scene that he himself had witnessed in a third-class train car, where he saw two guards escorting a female prisoner.
To learn more about the painting and Sorolla as an artist we talked to Meredith Malone, the associate curator at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis.
MEREDITH MALONE: He is using a very meticulous detail here to really augment the scene, augment the misery of this kind of human tragedy. And his goal was very much to faithfully depict reality, but to also reproduce the light of the, the actual setting and this train car.
Interestingly though, there is a preparatory sketch that you can see, and you can see that he did make a lot of choices. He very much decided to edit out any other human beings in here. The only people you see are the woman and the two guards in the back. But originally it was very much a packed scene. In the sketch also, the woman has her head down. You can't really see her face. It's covered in a black veil, she's trying to hide. But what he decided to do with the final composition was very much to edit down only the essential details to tell the story. So, in the final version, again, we only see her, we see the shackles on her hands. But we do get a very detailed depiction of her face in this very cramped space, too. And I think all of these are intentional moves that Sorolla made in order to heighten sort of the drama of the scene itself.
Sorolla based the painting on a scene that he himself had witnessed in a third-class train car, where he saw two guards escorting a female prisoner.
To learn more about the painting and Sorolla as an artist we talked to Meredith Malone, the associate curator at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis.
MEREDITH MALONE: He is using a very meticulous detail here to really augment the scene, augment the misery of this kind of human tragedy. And his goal was very much to faithfully depict reality, but to also reproduce the light of the, the actual setting and this train car.
Interestingly though, there is a preparatory sketch that you can see, and you can see that he did make a lot of choices. He very much decided to edit out any other human beings in here. The only people you see are the woman and the two guards in the back. But originally it was very much a packed scene. In the sketch also, the woman has her head down. You can't really see her face. It's covered in a black veil, she's trying to hide. But what he decided to do with the final composition was very much to edit down only the essential details to tell the story. So, in the final version, again, we only see her, we see the shackles on her hands. But we do get a very detailed depiction of her face in this very cramped space, too. And I think all of these are intentional moves that Sorolla made in order to heighten sort of the drama of the scene itself.