Research

A Research (Una investigación), also called Dr Simarro in the Laboratory, is an 1897 oil on canvas, 122 × 151 cm, by Joaquín Sorolla, showing the neurologist Luis Simarro and his colleagues at work by lamplight; it is in the Museo Sorolla, Madrid.

Simarro (1851–1921), a fellow Valencian, was Sorolla's friend and the family's doctor, and is regarded as a founder of Spanish neurology and psychology; he showed the young Santiago Ramón y Cajal Golgi's silver-stain method. Early in 1897 Sorolla was painting a formal portrait of him in his laboratory on Calle General Oráa. In a text quoted by the Museo Sorolla, the painter explained that he preferred to paint people in their own surroundings. One night Simarro, after breaking several hen's eggs in an embryology study without finding what he sought, suddenly called his pupils over, and the group of heads bent over the microscope and lit by artificial light gave Sorolla the idea for a second picture. Once the portrait was finished he kept returning each night to paint the group by the light of an Auer gas burner; the canvas never left the laboratory until it went to the exhibition.

Simarro, in a white coat, checks his work under the lamp, the composition's single light source, while colleagues and disciples, mostly in dark clothes and half in shadow, crowd round; a study in the journal of the Complutense University identifies Madinaveitia, Gayarre and Sandoval among them. Shelves of jars fill the background. The museum stresses the strong chiaroscuro, the thick white highlights and the emotional, unposed character of the scene, and Spanish Wikipedia compares the single-source lighting to Rembrandt.

The painting was shown at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Madrid in 1897 together with the portrait of Simarro at the microscope, and Sorolla received the medal of honour that year. It entered the Museo Sorolla as part of the founding bequest of the painter's widow.