Señora de Sorolla in Black

Señora de Sorolla (Clotilde García del Castillo, 1865–1929) in Black is a 1906 oil on canvas, 186.7 × 118.7 cm, by Joaquín Sorolla, a full-length portrait of his wife; it is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Clotilde, whom Sorolla married in 1888, was in the Met's words his confidant, travelling companion, bookkeeper and muse; he called her his 'Treasury Minister'. The portrait was painted in the studio of their house on Calle de Miguel Ángel in Madrid during the first months of 1906, when, according to German Wikipedia, Sorolla made seventeen portraits of family and friends. A photograph shows him laying in the figure on the canvas with broad charcoal strokes, and a large charcoal study shows Clotilde in the same dress in a different pose, kneeling on the chair with her back turned.

Here she poses as a Spanish beauty in a black satin evening gown with padded shoulders, sleeves of sheer tulle and a yellow rose at the narrow waist, one hand resting on a red high-backed chair. Behind her head hangs Sorolla's painting of a praying saint, made in Italy in the first months of their marriage in 1888 and later acquired by the Prado, so that its gilding almost forms a halo. At the far right he suggested the edge of another canvas, a device the Met links to Velázquez. Compared with his sunlit beach scenes, the colour and light are restrained.

In 1907 the portrait was sent to Sorolla's exhibition at Eduard Schulte's gallery in Düsseldorf and Cologne. It then hung prominently in his hugely successful exhibition at the Hispanic Society of America in New York in February and March 1909, where the Met bought it at once through the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe fund. It was shown again in the Prado's Sorolla retrospective in 2009 and in Sorolla y la moda at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in 2018.