They Still Say Fish is Expensive

And They Still Say Fish Is Expensive! (¡Aún dicen que el pescado es caro!) is an 1894 oil on canvas, 151.5 × 204 cm, by Joaquín Sorolla, showing an injured young fisherman being tended in the hold of a boat; it is in the Museo del Prado, Madrid.

The Prado calls it the best-known of the social-theme paintings of Sorolla's youth. In the early 1890s social realism was a leading genre in Madrid's official art world, where he was seeking his first public honours, and the subject touched the lives of people in his native Valencia. After the success of Another Marguerite! in 1892, the picture won him another first-class medal at the National Exhibition of 1895, where he showed it with thirteen other works, mostly portraits. The Spanish state bought it from him that year; it was later held by the Museo de Arte Moderno and the Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo before passing to the Prado.

The title comes from the last pages of Flor de mayo, a novel about the fishermen of the Cabanyal beach in Valencia that Sorolla's friend Vicente Blasco Ibáñez was writing while the canvas was being painted; it was published in 1895. After a fisherman dies in an accident at sea, his aunt curses the women who haggle at the fish market and asks whether they still think fish is dear.

The boy, barely more than a child, lies bare-chested with a medal hanging at his neck, a devotional charm against misfortune that Spanish Wikipedia suggests shows the Virgen del Carmen, patron of seafarers. One old fisherman supports his shoulders while the other, in a traditional Catalan barretina cap, presses on the wound a compress just soaked in the pot of water in the foreground. Around them are the things of a working boat: a lamp, a barrel of fresh water, ropes and the day's fish.