Like Turner, Monet forced the colour of his shadows, as MacColl points out, and like Monet, Sorolla forces the colour of his shadows—­but what a compeller of beautiful shadows—­forces the key to the very verge of the luminous abyss.  Senor Beruete, the Velasquez expert, truthfully says of Sorolla’s method:  “His canvases contain a great variety of blues and violets, balanced and juxtaposed with reds and yellows.  These, and the skilful use of white, provide him with a colour scheme of great simplicity, originality, and beauty.”  There are no non-transparent shadows, and his handling of blacks reveals a sensitive feeling for values.  Consider that black-gowned portrait of his wife.  His underlying structural sense is never obscured by his fat, flowing brush.

It must not be supposed that because of Sorolla’s enormous brio his general way of entrapping nature is brutal.  He is masculine and absolutely free from the neurasthenic morbidezza of his fellow-countryman Zuloaga. (And far from attaining that painter’s inches as a psychologist.) For the delineation of moods nocturnal, of poetic melancholy, of the contemplative aspect of life we must not go to Sorolla.  He is not a thinker.  He is the painter of bright mornings and brisk salt breezes.  He is half Greek.  There is Winckelmann’s Heiterkeit, blitheness, in his groups of romping children, in their unashamed bare skins and naive attitudes.  Boys on Valencian beaches evidently believe in Adamic undress.  Nor do the girls seem to care.  Stretched upon his stomach on the beach, a youth, straw-hatted, stares at the spume of the rollers.  His companion is not so unconventionally disarrayed, and as she has evidently not eaten of the poisonous apple of wisdom she is free from embarrassment.  Balzac’s two infants, innocent of their sex, could not be less carefree than the Sorolla children.  How tenderly, sensitively, he models the hardly nubile forms of maidens.  The movement of their legs as they race the strand, their dash into the water, or their nervous pausing at the rim of the wet—­here is poetry for you, the poetry of glorious days in youth-land.  Curiously enough his types are for the most part more international than racial; that is, racial as are Zuloaga’s Basque brigands, manolas, and gipsies.

But only this?  Can’t he paint anything but massive oxen wading to their buttocks in the sea; or fisher boats with swelling sails blotting out the horizon; or a girl after a dip standing, as her boyish cavalier covers her with a robe—­you see the clear, pink flesh through her garb; or vistas of flower gardens with roguish maidens and courtly parks; peasants harvesting, working women sorting raisins; sailors mending nets, boys at rope-making—­is all this great art?  Where are the polished surfaces of the cultured studio worker; where the bric-a-brac which we inseparably connect with pseudo-Spanish art?  You will not find any of them.  Sorolla, with good