Kissing the Relic

Kissing the Relic (El beso de la reliquia) is an 1893 oil on canvas, 103.5 × 122.5 cm, by Joaquín Sorolla, showing worshippers queuing to kiss a relic in a Valencian church; it is in the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum.

In the early 1890s Sorolla, then living in Madrid, concentrated on large figure paintings of historical, religious and social subjects for the salons and international exhibitions. Kissing the Relic belongs to a group of works from that decade showing scenes of popular devotion inside the Baroque churches of Valencia, and it is the best known of them. It was also the first picture he showed in Paris: at the Salon of the Société des Artistes Français in 1893 it won a third-class medal, and the gold medal itself, with its diploma, is kept in the Museo Sorolla in Madrid.

The setting is a side chapel of the church of San Pablo in Valencia, whose buildings now house the Instituto Luis Vives. A priest in a black cassock and stole holds out a reliquary while women in shawls and headscarves, a girl and a few men wait their turn; one young woman bends to kiss it. Sorolla sets the dark mass of figures against the pale glazed-tile floor, the gilded reliquary cabinet on the wall and the white cloth over the altar at right. The picture is signed 'J. Sorolla' in the lower left corner.

The painting went on to win a second-class medal at the International Exhibition in Vienna in 1894 and a first medal at the Exhibition of Spanish Art in Bilbao. It entered the Bilbao museum's collection as a contribution from the city council in 1913. In 2013 the museum received as a gift an unfinished sketch from the same series of church interiors, whose whereabouts had been unknown.