Sorolla’s unpublished letters found in the Archive of the Nobility are on display in his museum

The unpublished letters by the artist Joaquín Sorolla, which were in the Villagonzalo Collection of the Archivo de la Nobleza (Toledo) last year, are on display at the Sorolla Museum from Tuesday 2 July until 22 September.

The exhibition ‘Sorolla and the Count of Villagonzalo. An unpublished conversation’, which closes the programme to commemorate the centenary of the artist’s death, brings to light the discovery of the Archive of the Nobility and contextualises it with the documentation safeguarded by the museum, highlighting the portrait made by Sorolla of the daughter of the Count of Villagonzalo in 1907 or some unpublished sketches that were found in one of the letters, dated 5 July.

Following the discovery of these letters that Joaquín Sorolla sent to the 7th Count of Villagonzalo, Mariano Miguel Maldonado Dávalos, on the occasion of the commission for the portrait of his daughter María Luisa Maldonado y Salabert, a joint research process was initiated between the Archivo de la Nobleza and the Sorolla Museum. Thanks to the cross-referencing of data with other letters, photographs and documents kept in the museum’s archive, it has been possible to reconstruct the professional and friendly relationship that existed between the painter and the nobleman.

The exhibition, curated by the curator of the Sorolla Museum, Noemí Lozano, and the curator of the Historical Archive of the Nobility, Mara López-Villalta, also shows the count’s replicas of Sorolla and provides details about the artist’s creative process.

To complete the exhibition, ‘Sorolla and the Count of Villagonzalo. An unpublished conversation’ includes two paintings that have rarely been exhibited to the public, such as ‘Portrait of the Count of Villagonzalo’; a preliminary study for the portrait of Queen Victoria Eugenia with a Spanish mantilla in which, although the monarch consort has the same pose as in the final painting, the colour of her mantilla changes; and photographs of the 7th Count of Villagonzalo with his grandson, portrayed by Kâulak and other photographs that show Sorolla painting the king in the gardens of La Granja.