Museo Sorolla Studio

Based in Sorolla's former home in Madrid, the Museo Sorolla was opened to the public following the death of his widow, Clotilde Garcia del Castillo, in 1932. The house had originally been built in 1909-10, under Sorolla's supervision; in size and scale, it was designed to reflect the artist's status as a successful gentleman-painter, as Sorolla was then among the most successful artists in Spain. 'All of Sorolla's plunging into paint comes of his desire to work while the impression is vivid,' wrote a critic of his solo exhibition in Paris in 1906. 'Although the work is rude, there is not a careless stroke in it, or a colour wrongly placed. When he has had his say nothing can induce him again to touch the canvas'.

Today the Museo Sorolla houses nearly a thousand objects, including the largest single collection of Sorolla's paintings in the world. Despite Sorolla's international standing, many of these works are pictures of his wife and family, reflecting the personal, domestic quality of the space as much as its grandeur. These paintings are displayed much as the artist originally arranged them, in the high-roofed, strongly lit central studio. Visitors can also see the garden Sorolla designed as a tribute to the Mediterranean, in a mixture of Italian and Andalusian styles, personal objects from Sorolla's life - porcelain, pill-boxes, rococo mirrors and a nineteenth-century day bed - as well as the artist's collection of Spanish ceramics, lustreware, sculpture, polychromy and jewellery. The lower-ground floor hosts a rotating programme of temporary exhibitions.