Mother

Mother (Madre) is an oil on canvas, 125 × 169 cm, by Joaquín Sorolla, begun around 1895 and completed by about 1900, showing his wife Clotilde García del Castillo in bed with their newborn daughter Elena; it is in the Museo Sorolla, Madrid (inv. 324).

The picture commemorates Elena's birth on 12 July 1895 in Valencia, where Clotilde was staying with her family; Sorolla, then working in Paris, returned for the birth. Several oil studies are known, among them a sketch from life of 1895 showing his wife and the baby in bed, now catalogued as Clotilde en el lecho, and a baby's head of around 1900. The painting was long dated 1895, but following José Luis Díez's research for the Prado's 2009 Sorolla catalogue it is now placed around 1900. A photograph of Sorolla's studio from about that time shows the canvas at an earlier stage, with Clotilde looking out at the viewer; in the final version he turned her head in profile towards the child.

The composition is pared down almost to nothing: two heads, Clotilde's hand reaching towards the baby, and white in all its shades. Between the pleasure of sleep and exhaustion, mother and daughter rest facing each other, the newborn's small pink head beside the faintly pale face of the mother, in a cool half-light. The museum sees in it both a technical tour de force and one of the clearest examples of Sorolla's ability to convey physical sensations and states of mind through light and colour, with the emotion of the husband and father merged into the filtered light.

Today it hangs in the Museo Sorolla, the painter's former house and studio in Madrid, which his widow left to the Spanish state and which opened as a museum in 1932.