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SOROLLA:La Vision de Espana This 8.5 pound catalog with 434 pages including over 300 full page images and 14 fold out sections,- one for each mural, some as big as a poster. The printing is superb, the whites in the paintings are correct—the mural was recently restored. The canvases range from 12-14 feet in height, and total 227 feet in length. This book and the Russian Fechin are the two best books, we have handled. We are proud and excited to have found it and to present it to you for your consideration as an addition to your library. Price: $250 plus $15 for shipping, handling, and insurance
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Panoramic "Vision" Back From Tour of Spain
Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times Panels from "Vision of Spain" Joaquín Sorolla's panoramic mural, during reinstallation at the Hispanic Society of America.
Joaquín Sorolla, the Spanish painter, sketched costumed villagers and arid roads around his homeland in the 1910s. He was preparing for a huge commission: Archer Milton Huntington, a railroad heir in New York, had requested murals for an octagonal gallery at his new museum, the Hispanic Society of America on Broadway at 155th Street in Washington Heights. Sorolla exhausted himself at his Madrid studio clambering around ladders to finish the canvas panorama, "Vision of Spain," about 230 linear feet of hilltop towns, folk dancers, church processions, bullfighters and fishermen.
"This commission will eat up the best years of my life," Sorolla predicted in 1911. His health did soon fail; he died in 1923, at 60, and never saw the murals installed.
The society has displayed them almost continuously for eight decades. They are among the oldest and lengthiest art installations in town, but since 2007 they have been on the same roads that Sorolla traveled. While the Hispanic Society is under renovation, a Spanish bank financed a seven-city tour for "Vision of Spain" that has attracted two million visitors. (This is about the total number who have seen it at the Hispanic Society, which draws around 20,000 people annually.)
Last month a chartered jet returned the murals to New York, and conservators have been unrolling the canvases from wooden spools and stapling them back onto 1920s pine stretchers. Every paint fleck was cleaned and analyzed before the road trip to make sure nothing was too loose or brittle to travel, and the staffs at the Spanish museums "took out a few windows or blasted holes in the walls" to slide in the murals safely, said Marcus B. Burke, a senior curator at the Hispanic Society.
On a $5.5 million budget the society has reroofed the Sorolla gallery, upgraded its 1920s mechanical systems and removed drab file cabinets and counters. The ceiling has been painted white, as it was in Huntingtons time, but the paintings have been brought down from the frieze to eye level, so every brush stroke and paint drip is visible. "The effect will be that you can almost walk into the murals," Mr. Burke said. The museum will reopen May 8 with renovated or new spaces devoted to Goya, El Greco and Velázquez paintings and ceramics as varied as ruddy Chilean lamps inset with glass disks and milky Spanish porcelain that rivaled Wedgwood and Sèvres.