Aim of Ibiza

A little white beacon rises beyond a field of lavender rocks in Joaquín Sorolla’s Sketch of Ibiza. It is one of the smallest marks in the picture, yet it changes how the whole landscape reads. Around it, blue water, a low golden island and a pale sky establish a distant world. Below, the rocks crowd towards us, their surfaces broken into strokes of cream, mauve, rust and violet. The eye moves between these two scales: a broad expanse of coast and sea, and the immediate irregularity of stone.

Sorolla painted this small oil on cardboard in 1919. Measuring just 20 × 24 centimetres, it was catalogued as Apunte de Ibiza, or Sketch of Ibiza, in Edmund Peel and Cindy Mack’s 1989 exhibition catalogue. The Spanish word apunte identifies its character as a sketch or note: a compact statement in paint in which the landscape remains inseparable from the marks that describe it.^[1]

A view across the rocks

The foreground occupies most of the picture. Broad rocky slopes fill the lower edge and climb towards the right, almost shutting off the sea. Their uneven upper contour rises and falls beneath the blue, creating a succession of overlapping ledges. A particularly bright face at the left catches the light in a nearly white patch; ochre marks alongside it give the pale mass a warmer edge.

Through the middle runs a darker cleft. Its shadow cuts diagonally through the light rock, drawing the gaze upwards towards the water. The passage is narrow and broken rather than a regular path. Looking into it, one becomes aware of the difference between a surface tilted into the light and an opening that falls away from it. Sorolla makes that difference legible through a few strong changes of colour and value. Deep violet beside pale lavender is enough to suggest a sudden turn in the stone.

The foreground also gives the view its peculiar balance. Its many slanting marks and fractured shapes appear restless, but they support a much quieter arrangement above. The sea stretches laterally across the painting. Beyond it, the golden land lies low against the sky. These horizontal bands steady the picture without eliminating the force of the diagonals below. The result is a landscape that feels both open and obstructed: the eye can travel out to the horizon, while the nearest ground remains emphatically rough.

The viewpoint matters as much as the objects. We look across and slightly down over the rocks, which overlap the water and conceal the immediate shoreline. The meeting of land and sea is therefore partly withheld. Rather than tracing the entire coast, Sorolla lets one visible blue interval establish the distance between the foreground and the island. A surprisingly large space opens beyond a few crowded forms.

The small beacon and the distant island

Near the middle of the horizon, the pale upright beacon interrupts the long horizontal sweep. It is hardly elaborated: a narrow light form, a darker accent and a small base distinguish it from its surroundings. Its vertical shape makes it conspicuous among the flatter bands of sea and land. The structure provides a point at which the eye can pause after following the broken foreground upwards.

The beacon’s softened edges keep it in the distance. Its light colour approaches that of the sky, while darker touches around its foot connect it to the blue water. It remains recognizable without becoming detached from the atmosphere around it.

The island to the left is handled just as economically. Its warm ridge rises gently, then descends towards the beacon. Orange and yellow accents distinguish it from the cooler foreground. The change of colour helps separate the planes. We read the nearer rocks through their many faceted transitions; the island arrives as a simplified silhouette. Distance has reduced the amount of information while leaving its general shape clear.

Between those two land masses, the blue water is unusually concentrated. Small pale strokes break its surface, but it does not carry the dense pattern of reflections found in some of Sorolla’s other seascapes. Its comparatively continuous colour gives the eye relief from the tangled foreground. The sea’s brilliance comes partly from this contrast in handling: a clear strip of colour set beside pale, heavily divided stone.

What the small format makes possible

At twenty centimetres high, the sketch asks to be considered at close range. A stroke that looks broad in an enlarged reproduction represents a small movement across the actual support. That relationship helps explain its mixture of immediate recognition and visible abbreviation. A short mark can describe a whole plane of rock; a few touches can establish the beacon. The painting gives each element only the amount of detail needed for its role in the composition.

The brushwork changes with the terrain. Long slanting strokes follow the foreground slopes, while shorter dark touches punctuate hollows and broken edges. In the sky, pale colour spreads more evenly, with soft blue-grey interruptions. The contrast distinguishes solid, fractured ground from the relatively continuous space above it. The broad sky gives the broken rock formations room to register as a coherent mass.

Light, too, is distributed unevenly. The foreground is pale overall, yet its brightest passages are concentrated on particular faces. White and cream sit beside mauve shadows, while ochre and reddish touches keep the rock from becoming a single cool mass. These colours describe differences within the stone and make its surfaces turn. The light is therefore carried by relationships across the picture, as well as by the isolated white accents.

Peel’s introduction to the 1989 catalogue treats Sorolla’s apuntes as observations of nature with their own value, rather than simply preliminary designs for larger canvases.^[1] That distinction is helpful here. The sketch has an intelligible visual structure at its own scale: near rock, intervening sea, distant land and sky. Its open handling allows us to see how those relationships have been assembled.

Ibiza in 1919

The sketch belongs to a documented period of work on Ibiza. In September 1919, Narciso Puget Viñas photographed Sorolla painting outdoors among the island’s cliffs. The Museo Sorolla preserves the photograph as inventory 80189 and identifies the canvas in it as Los contrabandistas (The Smugglers). The record dates the photograph to September and notes its publication in Blanco y Negro on 19 October 1919.^[2] It places Sorolla’s engagement with rocky coastal terrain within a specific painting campaign, while showing him at work on another composition.

The visit also brought him into contact with the island’s artistic community. The Museu Puget’s account of Narcís Puget Viñas describes his encounter with Sorolla in 1919 as an encouragement to resume painting actively.^[3] Puget was both a painter and a photographer, and the surviving photograph gives this meeting a tangible setting. Ibiza emerges as a place where Sorolla worked in company with other artists, as well as a source of striking coastal forms.

Within that setting, the sketch concentrates on a particularly spare arrangement. No figures mediate between the viewer and the land. The little beacon is the clearest sign of a built presence, but the rocks carry the greater visual weight. Their varied surfaces are sufficient to sustain the picture’s movement and colour.

Water, colour and viewpoint

A useful comparison is The White Boat, Jávea, where swimmers and a cropped white hull occupy water broken into flickering green, blue and pale reflections. There the gaze enters the sea itself. The figures’ bodies and the boat help explain the shifting colours around them. In Sketch of Ibiza, the viewer remains on the rocky side of the scene, looking across a narrower, more distant stretch of water. The different arrangements show how a change of viewpoint can transform the sea’s part in a painting.

Another revealing comparison is Hall of the Ambassadors, Alhambra, Granada. Its architecture and reflecting pool organize the view around a strong central alignment. Ibiza’s diagonal cleft offers a less regular route into depth, but both pictures make a pale structure stand against areas of blue. In each, the relationship between light surfaces and cool colour does much of the work of organizing space.

The 1989 catalogue records Sketch of Ibiza as unsigned, in a private collection, and formerly belonging to María Sorolla de Pons Arnau.^[1] Its intimate dimensions suit the close attention it rewards. At one glance, the scene resolves into rock, sea and island; at another, it separates into strokes whose directions and colours remain vividly distinct. That exchange between a convincing place and an economical painted surface is the sketch’s particular pleasure.