A student at the School of Fine Arts of Valencia from 1878, in 1885 Joaquín Sorolla obtained a grant to continue his studies in Assisi, Italy, from whence he also travelled to Paris. In 1889 he settled in Madrid with his wife, Clotilde García del Castillo.

He participated in the National Fine Arts Exhibition for the first time in 1884, but his first taste of success at the competition did not come until 1892. That year he presented, among other works, the Portrait of Agustín Otermín, featuring Sorolla's own disciple: the metalanguage of this "painted painter painting" casts us in the role of voyeurs in the artist's studio. With approximately five hundred and fifty individual portraits in Sorolla's extant oeuvre, there is no doubt that this was one of his most characteristic facets, and while it was not his favourite genre, it did bring him fame and prestige. The subject of the other portrait by Sorolla in the Banco Santander Collection has not been identified with certainty, although recent research indicates it may be Manuel Escrivá de Romaní, Count of Casal. This uncertainty and the fact that the work is unfinished do not detract from its strength and personality, and in fact are quite revealing of Sorolla's style as a portraitist. The loose brushwork and lack of background make it easier to see the impact that Velázquez, the master of masters, had on him in this genre.

In 1900 Sorolla won the Grand Prix at the Paris Salon, and in 1901 he received the medal of honour at the National Exhibition in Madrid. After that point his career became a steady stream of successes, with important solo shows in Paris, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Cologne, London, New York, Buffalo, Boston, Chicago and St. Louis. His celebrity brought him countless commissions; for example, in 1913 the American magnate and collector Thomas F. Ryan asked him to paint two pictures, one of which was the "forceful"1 Women Dancing Flamenco at the Café Novedades in Seville. Undoubtedly painted in his Madrid studio, basing the composition on sketches taken in Seville at the Café de la Campana, three studies now in the Museo Sorolla and an earlier painting entitled Two Gypsy Women, this canvas conveys the energetic force of which Sorolla wrote and the flavour of Andalusia.

But Sorolla's largest commission came when Archer M. Huntington hired him to decorate the library of the Hispanic Society of America in New York. After completing the final panel of his Vision of Spain, between July and September 1919, Sorolla travelled to Ibiza, where he painted Children Looking for Shellfish. In this work, as in the 1905 scenes painted at Jávea, he depicted the sea churning among the rocks that frame childish figures. A bold high-angle perspective allowed him to play with the shifting tones of the water and the light glinting off the children's wet skin, effects that Sorolla had perfected in the course of his career and which made his painting immensely popular. [Mónica Rodríguez Subirana]