The Skipping Rope

The Skipping Rope, La Granja (Saltando a la comba, La Granja) is an oil on canvas, 105 × 166 cm, painted by Joaquín Sorolla in the summer of 1907 in the gardens of the royal palace of La Granja de San Ildefonso; it is in the Museo Sorolla, Madrid (inv. 797).

Sorolla spent that summer at La Granja because the court had commissioned portraits of King Alfonso XIII and Queen Victoria Eugenie; the king's life-size portrait in hussar's uniform was painted there in the open air. The stay was also a family holiday while his elder daughter María recovered from tuberculosis, and the gardens became the setting for many of the pictures he made that summer, including portraits of his wife and daughters. The writer Leonard Williams, who was preparing the biographical texts for Sorolla's exhibitions in London in 1908 and New York in 1909, spent the summer with them.

The girl in the foreground is Sorolla's younger daughter Elena, then twelve, caught in mid-air with both feet off the ground, her shadow cast sharply on the path and the rope barely visible behind her. Behind her three smaller girls in white skip and run round a circular pool; the museum identifies the little blonde girl as Susan Williams, Leonard's daughter. Only the lower trunks of the trees are shown, sunlight filters through unseen leaves, and features are left vague. The museum compares the effect to a photographic snapshot, with the running figures setting up a spiral of movement around the water.

The painting stayed with Sorolla until his death in 1923 and passed with his house to the Spanish state. Numbers and labels on the back show that it was sent to the London and Liverpool exhibitions of 1908 and to Chicago and St Louis in 1911.