Clotilde seated on the Sofa

Clotilde Seated on a Sofa (Clotilde sentada en un sofá) is a 1910 oil on canvas, 180 × 110 cm, by Joaquín Sorolla, a full-length portrait of his wife Clotilde García del Castillo; it hangs in the Museo Sorolla in Madrid (inv. 900).

Clotilde, the daughter of the Valencian photographer Antonio García Peris, met Sorolla in 1879 when he worked in her father's studio, and they married in 1888. She was his most frequent model and, after the family moved to Madrid, also ran the business side of his career, arranging exhibitions and managing money; Sorolla called her his 'treasury minister'. The Museo Sorolla considers this the most accomplished of the very many portraits he made of her and a key work in his output.

She sits turned towards the viewer on a yellow sofa, in an exquisite white dress and delicate satin shoes. To catch the transparency of the gauze, Sorolla painted the dress directly over the ground of the canvas. The museum presents her as a refined woman whose appearance reflects the social standing the family had reached and, by extension, her husband's artistic success. It also points out that by this date Sorolla knew well the society portraits of John Singer Sargent, in which elegantly dressed sitters seem not to pose but simply to be there; yet this portrait, the most elegant Sorolla painted, is described as entirely free of affectation.

The picture was hung in the salon of the family's house on Paseo del General Martínez Campos, and the museum suggests the high viewpoint was chosen so that it could be seen from the upper landing of the main staircase. After Sorolla's death in 1923, Clotilde left the house and his work to the Spanish state; she died in 1929 and the Museo Sorolla opened there in 1932, with the portrait still in the salon.