Everything under the sun
Christopher Howse The sun comes up over the sea at Valencia, and no one shows this better than Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, a painter who reached the height of his powers in the first two decades of the 20th century.
The seaside that he depicted was not thronged by sunbathers or punctuated by marinas. He chose to paint fisherwomen on the shore shielding their eyes from the glare of the sun, a yoke of oxen pulling a boat from the water, or midday groups seeking shade in the lee of a hull.
Sorolla (1863-1923) was born in Valencia and is not at all well known in Britain. There's a portrait of Princess Beatrice, Queen Victoria's youngest daughter, by him in the National Portrait Gallery in London, but it is not on display. He's better known in reproduction.
Sorolla shows Valencia as it was, and Valencia is not really Spain. It has its own language, a dialect of Catalan, though Valencians think Catalan a dialect of Valenciano. The old architecture is all tall pillars, vaulting and high windows. Like Bilbao over the past two decades, Valencia, a serious port city with a million people, has been made more comfortable for tourists. Much that was dilapidated and quaint has been lost, though you can still manage to be robbed if you put your mind to it. The city squares with their fountains are shaded by palm trees, and the wind comes not from the mountains, but from the sea.
They call this side of the peninsula the Levant, as if it formed the other half of the far side of the Mediterranean. From the far side of that sea came ultramarinos — until recently the ordinary Spanish word for grocery — all the eastern goods that add an Arabian flavour to the region's food: cinnamon, almonds, saffron, rice, dates, raisins, aniseed, preserved anchovies, garlic, vinegar, olive oil.
Breakfast in Valencia is fresh bread smeared with tomato and drenched in olive oil, or ensaimadas — spirals of light bun dough dusted with icing sugar — with dark black coffee, let down a bit by its long-life milk. For lunch under a shady awning there is fresh fish: hake or cuttlefish or squid; a salad of lettuce (Little Gem, as in Sainsbury's but nearer to the field), tomato, onion, a bit of tuna, a few olives and probably a couple of bits of asparagus balanced on top, with lots of good olive oil and a little vinegar. Local wines are so darkly red and full of body that they can grapple with anything from garlic soup to lamb chops and peppers. There are puddings made with flaky pastry, marzipan, honey, egg yolks and spices. Then perhaps some brandy and cigars as a manhole cover.
After that you can either stumble enjoyably through the deserted afternoon streets or take a cooling dose of art. It is an interesting feeling physically to get out of the sun, the burning sun that hurts the skin, and out of the wind, which starts refreshingly and becomes desiccatingly tiring through its unresting perseverance, and then to plunge into air-conditioned galleries to look at Sorolla's images on canvas of the sun which you have fled.
In Madrid a whole museum is devoted to his works, in the house where he lived at the end of his life, exhausted by a decade travelling the country for his series of pictures 'Visions of Spain'. These were painted as panels for a room at the Museum of the Hispanic Society of America, in New York, and in the autumn a million-pound project will bring them for exhibition in Valencia.
Six of Sorolla's portraits also form part of the travelling exhibition of Spanish portraits in the Prado, from Goya to Sorolla, which arrived in Valencia on 10 June. The museum in Valencia permanently shows a dozen of his canvases, from all stages of his career. As a portraitist he had something in common with Sargent; the swirling mud in his picture 'Children on the Beach' (1910) could come from Edvard Munch. But it is to the sun that his paintings reach out.
Sorolla is not the only thing worth seeing in the Valencia art gallery. It's the proper item, with a self-portrait by Velazquez, a fairly rum El Greco of St John the Baptist, and a Jose Ribera of a sagging St Sebastian having an arrow plucked from his armpit. There are alarming still-lifes with spider crabs, wonderful altarpieces and panels from the late Middle Ages, and some pleasing if occasionally comic 19th-century canvases with titles such as 'The Sleepy Sermon' and 'A Mother's Love'.
Valencia's art gallery is formally called El Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia de San Pio V. Pope Pius V gets into it because the gallery makes use of the baroque building — church and arcaded courtyard — of the seminary founded under the directives of the Council of Trent, over which the pope presided. The seminary was confiscated from the Church by the liberal government in 1819 and turned into a military academy (that being the sort of good work that liberal governments undertake). It became an art gallery in 1946, but then in the early hours of an October day in 1957 the lower floors were ruined by an irresistible weight of water and mud. They have diverted the river since then.
For the past 30 years the regional and national governments have been spending huge amounts of money building and extending, and the results have never been grander, even though I don't much care for a church being converted into the narthex of a gallery complex. To make up for it, you can see the Holy Grail, on show at the cathedral. It is the chalice that Jesus used at the Last Supper. Pope Benedict used it more recently when he visited the city. The cup is made of agate, and is reckoned to date from the 1st century sc. Janice Bennett, an author from Illinois, has just written a book demonstrating, she thinks, the historicity of the tradition that this is the Grail.
There is certainly a living cult of the relic and what it signifies. During the Civil War, just before the cathedral was set on fire, a good local woman called Sabina Suey bravely hid the Grail, at great personal risk, under the wardrobe in her third-floor flat, and later beneath the cushions of a sofa in her brother's house, narrowly escaping several searches by the murderous Reds. Each year on the feast of Corpus Christi (which was 7 June this year), a brotherhood with pointed hoods carries it in procession through the streets. Well, actually they carry a facsimile, since the original is so precious. But the devotion is genuine.
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