Sad Inheritance

This Study for Sad Inheritance is an oil sketch on canvas, 40 × 58 cm, by Joaquín Sorolla, painted in 1899 as a preparatory work for his large canvas ¡Triste herencia! and dedicated in 1906 to the French painter William Laparra; it is in a private collection.

The finished picture, 210 × 285 cm, shows sick and disabled boys from the Valencian hospital of San Juan de Dios being taken to bathe in the sea on a Valencian beach, watched by a friar in black. Sorolla said he had been sketching fishermen one morning when he saw the group in the distance and asked the hospital's director for permission to paint the scene on the spot. The subject affected him deeply; he found the big canvas hard to finish, and after sending it to Paris he wrote to a friend that it was his nightmare and his fear. It won the grand prize at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 and a medal of honour at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Madrid in 1901. Sotheby's describes it as closing his social-realist phase and opening the beach pictures of the following decade.

The study is quick and open: sails on the horizon, lines of breaking surf, boys splashing in blue-green water and one standing figure silhouetted on the sand. Its inscription calls it the 'first sketch' (primer apunte) for the painting.

After the success of the big picture Sorolla gave at least three of its oil studies to fellow artists: one to John Singer Sargent in 1903, now in the Masaveu Collection in Madrid, and two in 1906, to William Merritt Chase and to Laparra, which explains why this sketch carries a later date. It was shown that year at Sorolla's exhibition at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris, no. 260. Later owned in Madrid and sold by the Broadway Art Gallery in Gloucestershire in the mid-1960s, it fetched £182,500 at Sotheby's London in 2014 and was offered again at Sotheby's New York in November 2024.