Museo Sorolla: The Painter's House and Garden
Why is it significant?
Step through the gate and you are suddenly out of Madrid: tiles, myrtle hedges, the trickle of fountains, a long narrow pool, a bench under a pergola, and a red-brick house wrapped in climbing plants. This is the house of Joaquín Sorolla, the painter of light.
Key Facts
| Place | Museo Sorolla: The Painter's House and Garden |
|---|---|
| Address | Paseo del General Martínez Campos 37, 28010 Madrid, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 40.43540, -3.69250 |
| Part of Walk | The Marquis Who Built a City: Madrid's Salamanca District & the Castellana |
| Generated | Generated |
Step through the gate and you are suddenly out of Madrid: tiles, myrtle hedges, the trickle of fountains, a long narrow pool, a bench under a pergola, and a red-brick house wrapped in climbing plants. This is the house of Joaquín Sorolla, the painter of light.
Sorolla was born in Valencia in 1863 and became the most successful Spanish painter of his time, famous for beaches full of children, sails and dazzling Mediterranean sun. With his earnings he built this house in 1910 and 1911, and he designed the garden himself, in three parts, inspired by what he had painted at the Alhambra in Granada and the Alcázar in Seville. He wanted a piece of the south in the heart of the capital... and he painted it again and again.
Inside, the great studio remains as he left it, with his brushes, his easels and canvases that seem to give off heat. Between 1911 and 1919 he worked on his biggest commission, fourteen enormous panels called Vision of Spain for the Hispanic Society in New York, a portrait of the regions of the whole country.
It was here, in his own garden, in June 1920, that Sorolla suffered a stroke while painting a portrait. He never painted again. He died three years later, in 1923, in Cercedilla in the mountains north of Madrid. His widow, Clotilde García del Castillo, his lifelong model and muse, left the house and its contents to the state, and the museum opened in 1932.
Sit on one of the tiled benches for a moment and listen to the water. You started this walk at the palace of a banker who bet on a city of the future. You end it in the garden of a painter who built himself a small, private paradise inside that city. Both of them, in their way, won. The walk ends here... and Madrid's afternoon light is all yours.