The exhibition, curated by Consuelo Luca de Tena and Lorena Delgado, is made up of more than fifty works from the collections of the Sorolla Museum, Sorolla Museum Foundation, Bancaja Foundation, Prado Museum, Diputació de València, Fine Arts Museum of Valencia, Abelló Collection, BBVA Collection, Pedrera Martínez Collection, Álvarez de Miranda Collection and the Complutense University of Madrid, among other public and private collections.

The exhibition, with the participation of Bankia, reveals that the female presence is abundant and varied in the painter’s production, sensitive to aesthetic qualities such as grace and beauty, but above all to other qualities such as courage and strength. His work reflects many of the female stereotypes of his time: angels of the home, fallen women, simple, hard-working women of the pueblo, elegant bourgeois and “modern” women; but they are rarely just “types”: they are individual people, flesh and blood, and as such Sorolla always treated them with respect.

Sorolla’s life coincided with the beginnings of the feminist movement in Spain, but it was still very much in the minority: Spanish women still had a very low cultural level, few had access to secondary education, and university was practically forbidden to them until 1910. When Sorolla died in 1923, the recognition of women’s right to vote was still eight years away. As for the right to vote, it would not be recognised until 1931 (Sorolla did not know about it: he had died in 1923). The painter, who was never a militant, was characterised by his liberal ideas and maintained close relations with the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, a promoter of female education and defender of equality, where he educated his daughters.

The exhibition is structured in five blocks: history, mythology and other pretexts; women of the people; workers and mothers; elegant and modern; and family scenes. This last block has been incorporated into the presentation of the exhibition in Valencia in an extension of the work on display with respect to its presentation at the Sorolla Museum in Madrid in 2020.