Sorolla in Lluca

Sorolla in Lluca

Sketch of Joaquín Sorolla

Whenever you do research on a subject, wonderful things happen, some of them qualified as serendipity, finding something you were not looking for. This is what happened when researching some of the stories of the people of Jávea.

During the 125th anniversary of the arrival of the painter Sorolla to our town, some information was shared with us about a sketch that the Valencian artist had made in a place in Jávea, specifically in the Partida de Lluca.

In this enquiry it was pointed out that Jaime Andrada Llobell - father of the famous brothers Jaime and Juan Andrada Salvador, both martyrs of the religious persecution in Spain during the 20th century and in the process of beatification - was living in Lluca at the time when Sorolla took notes in this characteristic area of the town, and that it served as a model, together with his yoke of oxen, for a work about the hard work in the fields.

José Andrada Belenguer poses next to the Sorolla in which his grandfather supposedly appears.

This unpublished story of Jaime Andrada and Jaquín Sorolla was passed down from generation to generation in the Andrada-Salvador family. Several years ago, during the Hispanic Society of New York exhibition at the Bancaja headquarters in Valencia, José Andrada Belenguer, Jaime's grandson, approached the heads of the cultural organisation and the American institution with the aim of providing this documentation. The New York foundation compiled the data and gave José permission to be photographed next to the drawing showing his grandfather.

This anecdote shows that Sorolla's relationship with Jávea is still full of mysteries, such as that of the four anonymous families in Jávea who still have paintings by Joaquín Sorolla hanging on their walls that have yet to be catalogued and have only been contemplated by a privileged few...