who saw Sorolla’s art at the Paris Exposition, 1900, and at the Georges Petit Gallery, Paris, a few years ago need not be reminded of his virile quality and masterly brush-work.  Some art lovers in this city are aware of his Sad Inheritance, the property of Mr. John E. Berwind, which has been hung in the Sunday-school room of the Ascension Church, Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street.  It is one of the artist’s few pictures in which he feels the Weltschmerz.  His is a nature bubbling over with health and happiness.

He is a Valencian, was born in 1863 of poor parents, and by reason of his native genius and stubborn will power he became what he is—­the painter of vibrating sunshine without equal.  Let there be no mincing of comparisons in this assertion.  Not Turner, not Monet painted so directly blinding shafts of sunlight as has this Spaniard.  He is an impressionist, but not of the school of Monet.  His manner is his own, cunningly compounded as it is of the proceeds of half a dozen artists.  His trip to Rome resulted in nothing but a large eclectic canvas without individuality; what had this pagan in common with saints or sinners!  He relates that in Paris Bastien-Lepage and Menzel affected him profoundly.  This statement is not to be contradicted; nevertheless Sorolla is the master of those two masters in his proper province of the portrayal of outdoor life.  Degas was too cruel when he called Bastien the “Bouguereau of the modern movement”; Bastien academicised Manet and other moderns.  He said nothing new.  As for Menzel, it would be well here to correct the notion bandied about town that he discovered impressionism before the French.  He did not.  He went to Paris in 1867.  Meissonier at first, and later Courbet, influenced him.  His Rolling Mill was painted in 1876.  It is very Courbet.  The Paris Exposition, 1867, picture shows the influence of Monet—­who was in the Salon of 1864; and Monet was begat by Boudin, who stemmed from Jongkind; and Jongkind studied with Isabey; and they came from Turner, idolater of the Sun.  Remember, too, that Corot and Courbet called Eugene Boudin “roi des ciels.”  Monet not only studied with him but openly admitted that he had learned everything from him, while Boudin humbly remarked that he had but entered the door forced by the Dutchman Jongkind.  Doubtless Sorolla found what he was looking for in Bastien, though it would be nearer the truth to say that he studied the Barbizons and impressionists and took what he needed from them all.

He is a temperament impressionable to the sun, air, trees, children, women, men, cattle, landscapes, the ocean.  Such swift, vivid notation of the fluid life about him is rare; it would be photographic were it not the personal memoranda of a selecting eye; it would be transitory impressionism were it not for a hand magical in its manipulation of pigments.  Brain and brush collaborate with an instantaneity that does not perplex because the result is so convincing.