National Gallery opens Sorolla's first major exhibition in the UK for over a century

Filling the Sainsbury Wing exhibition galleries, the display will feature sixty works spanning the artist’s career, including important masterpieces on loan from public and private collections in Europe and the United States. This will be the first UK retrospective of the artist since 1908 when Sorolla himself mounted an exhibition at London’s Grafton Galleries where he was promoted as The World’s Greatest Living Painter. While it was his sun-drenched depictions of the life, landscapes and traditions of Spain, as well as his gifts as a portraitist, which sealed his fame, Sorolla, who trained in Valencia and studied in Madrid and Rome, first won an international reputation for major works tackling social subjects. For the first time in the UK a series of these prized early social paintings will be brought together including his ‘The Return from Fishing’ (1894, Paris, Musée d’Orsay), which was bought by the French government; and ‘Sewing the Sail’ (1896, Fondazione Musei C