Before visiting the National Gallery Exhibition of paintings by the Spanish impressionist painter Sorolla, I knew nothing about this artist. I gather he is particularly popular in the United States and his home country. I loved his light-filled oil paintings of beach scenes and gardens and his painting style reminded me of John Singer Sargent, his contemporary.
The lesson I took away from his garden paintings is not to worry too much about a finished look to a painting, as his quite often had areas that were not fully developed. In the same way, my own painting of a fountain in Bridge End Gardens (Saffron Walden) has a background that is just floated in wet-in-wet and left fairly vague, so as not to compete with the foreground.
