Another Margarita

A woman sits with her head lowered in a railway carriage. Two armed guards occupy the bench behind her, while the seats beside and opposite her remain empty. Sunlight falls across the wooden interior, illuminating a wall, the floor and the edge of a bench. The contrast between that bright, ordinary space and the dark figure at its centre gives Joaquín Sorolla’s Another Margarita its unsettling force. The journey continues around someone whose own movement has been restricted.

Sorolla painted this oil on canvas in 1892. Titled ¡Otra Margarita! in Spanish and Another Marguerite! by its owner, it belongs to the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, a gift from Charles Nagel, Sr., in 1894.^[1]

Inside the carriage

Sorolla places the woman close to the spectator. Her dark shawl spreads around her shoulders and over the bench, making a broad, irregular shape against the straight lines of the carriage. Below it, pale dots interrupt the darkness of her skirt. Her face is turned down, and her hands rest together in her lap. The restraints at her wrists give a specific meaning to a pose that, without them, might belong to an exhausted passenger.

Behind her, the guards’ hats, dark uniforms and weapons identify a different kind of presence. One rifle makes a strong diagonal beside the nearer man’s head and shoulder. The wooden back of the woman’s bench runs between her and the men, so that all three figures occupy the same confined interior without becoming a conversational group. Their proximity makes her custody clear; their separation preserves the stillness of the scene.

The perspective is unusually active for such an immobile subject. The bench enters from the lower left and leads towards the right, past the woman and into the unoccupied part of the carriage. Floorboards and the facing seat continue this recession. These lines offer the eye routes through the picture, yet the human figure remains folded inward. Looking across the empty seats and then back to her gives the composition its rhythm: an expanse of usable space surrounds a person who has little freedom within it.

A tied bundle sits beside her in the foreground. Its orange, yellow and red pattern introduces some of the strongest colour in the painting. Sorolla gives this small object enough prominence to balance the dark clothing without competing with the face. The knot and gathered fabric make it recognisable as portable belongings, but its contents remain concealed. It brings the practical business of travelling into a scene dominated by detention.

The wall behind the figures consists of horizontal wooden boards. Upright supports and narrow windows interrupt their repeated bands. The interior has its own firm construction, against which the folds of the woman’s clothing seem soft and heavy. The picture’s emotional pressure comes partly from this unequal encounter between a vulnerable body and an orderly enclosure. Nothing in the carriage bends towards her or answers her lowered gaze.

What does the title mean?

The title supplies a story beyond the visible railway scene. The Kemper Museum connects Margarita with Margaret, or Gretchen, in Goethe’s Faust: a woman seduced by Faust who later kills her child and faces punishment. That literary association makes the painted prisoner another figure through whom an audience might consider abandonment, sexual judgment and responsibility. It does not identify the model or establish the circumstances of an actual criminal case.^[1]

The word “another” is especially charged. It proposes repetition, inviting a viewer familiar with Gretchen’s story to recognise a comparable predicament in a contemporary setting. Sorolla gives that association a recognisably modern vehicle: a train carrying a woman under armed escort. The title opens the scene backwards towards an implied past, while the painted carriage carries it forwards towards an unseen destination.

Neither part of that journey is depicted. There is no courtroom, child, accuser or lover in the picture. Instead, Sorolla concentrates on the interval of transport. The viewer encounters the woman after some decisive event and before another, with only her present circumstances available to sight. This suspended narrative makes the title influential: readers who know the literary reference may bring an entire tragedy to a scene containing remarkably little action.

Early commentators did precisely that. Writing in the essay republished by the Hispanic Society of America in 1909, Leonard Williams treated the woman as guilty of infanticide and read her posture as an expression of remorse. He even imagined compassionate speculation in one guard’s gaze. Those statements reveal the story Williams found in the painting, rather than furnishing an independently documented biography of its sitter.^[2]

His account also shows how a restrained composition could sustain elaborate interpretation. Williams valued the absence of demonstrative emotion and drew attention to the patterned dress and bundle as exceptions to the carriage’s bareness. His response moves between accurate observation of a few painted particulars and confident assertions about thoughts invisible to the spectator. Reading the picture today, that distinction leaves room to attend to the woman’s exposure and confinement without requiring certainty about her guilt or inner life.

An observed incident, a constructed painting

The Kemper Museum reports that the subject originated in an incident Sorolla witnessed while travelling between Madrid and Valencia: a female prisoner accompanied by two civil guards in a third-class carriage. Its learning guide also explains that he recreated the scene with models in an actual railway car. The painting therefore joins an encounter during travel to a deliberately arranged composition.^[3]

Aureliano de Beruete’s early account gives a more specific setting for that work. He describes Sorolla installing his canvas in a third-class carriage at El Grao station and arranging the woman, the guards and the bundle. According to Beruete, arriving at the composition required considerable thought; painting it then took only a few days. His narrative presents concentrated execution as the result of preparation, rather than a substitute for it.^[4]

The choice of a real carriage offered more than plausible equipment. It placed bodies, timber, windows and daylight in relation to one another. In this setting, light has to enter through limited openings and strike surfaces at different angles. The sharp bright patches on the right and the softer illumination across the wall belong to the architecture of the space. The woman’s face becomes visible within that pattern, while the shawl remains a large dark mass.

An interior of this kind also complicates the familiar division between Sorolla’s dark social pictures and his luminous outdoor work. Here, sunlight is already a major compositional force. It picks out surfaces, separates figures from their setting and leads the eye across the canvas. Its presence offers no simple release from the subject. The bright wood remains part of the same carriage that holds the prisoner.

Beruete’s account emphasised painting under the lighting conditions of the represented scene. His interest was in the credibility achieved through arranging and observing real things. The finished result, however, depends equally on selection: where the spectator stands, how much floor remains exposed, how the benches divide the figures and where the strongest darks accumulate. Naturalistic detail and a carefully directed narrative work together.^[4]

How the composition changed

A preparatory oil in the Museo Sorolla, inventory 00312, preserves a markedly different arrangement. Dated 1892, it places the woman between the guards, with additional figures behind them. In the museum’s reproduction, the group crowds the foreground; faces and dark clothing gather into a compact cluster. The final canvas opens a much larger area of empty carriage and gives the woman a more distinct position before her escorts.^[5]

The change alters the spectator’s encounter with the subject. The study presents a prisoner surrounded by people, while the completed painting sets her body against a long stretch of unoccupied seating. Both arrangements make custody visible, but the second gives the space around her a greater role. Isolation becomes something the viewer can measure across the bench and floor.

The museum also associates a charcoal drawing, inventory 13343, with the painting’s preparation. Its catalogue distinguishes the sketch on the front from the separate scene on the reverse and relates it to another surviving sheet, inventory 13340. These records extend the evidence for Sorolla considering alternative groupings before settling on the final canvas.^[6]

Together, the surviving preparation and Beruete’s account help explain the painting’s economy. The finished scene contains relatively few conspicuous objects, yet their positions are consequential. The bundle sits where its colour and roundness interrupt the long bench; the guards gather behind the woman; the open floor draws the viewer into the carriage. The apparent simplicity is a resolved arrangement of figures and intervals.

Recognition in Spain and America

Beruete records the painting’s success at the International Exhibition in Madrid in 1892, where it received a first-class medal. The following year it travelled to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Roberta A. Mayer’s study of Sorolla’s American connections identifies the five oils he sent there as his American debut and confirms the Medal of Honor awarded to Another Marguerite!.^[4][7]

The sequence is strikingly quick: painted in 1892, exhibited in Chicago in 1893 and given to the St. Louis collection by Nagel in 1894. This was a large narrative picture capable of carrying Sorolla’s name into an international exhibition and then into an American institution. Its railway setting was concrete and particular, while the title offered a literary connection that could travel with it.

Christian Brinton, writing in the Hispanic Society’s 1909 volume, looked back on the work as an important breakthrough. He characterised it as social realism and linked its reception in Madrid and Chicago to Sorolla’s growing standing. His account belongs to a moment when the painter’s American audience was being invited to understand an already substantial career. The early prisoner picture provided a point from which to describe that development.^[8]

The painting subsequently appeared in Art in the Age of Steam in 2008–2009, the Prado’s Sorolla retrospective in 2009 and London’s Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light in 2019.^[1] These settings bring different aspects of the canvas into view: rail travel, artistic development and the uses of light.

A railway scene within Sorolla’s work

The closest comparison is White Slave Trade, another painting organised around women travelling in a wooden railway carriage. The comparison begins with the visible interiors: hard benches, constricted space, personal bundles and light entering from the side. In that picture, several female figures and their belongings crowd the compartment. In Another Margarita, the emptiness around a single foreground woman makes the organisation more severe.

Sorolla varies the relationship between people and enclosure. In White Slave Trade, bodies lean and overlap, and patterned textiles accumulate across the lower part of the canvas. Here, the isolated bundle and dotted skirt punctuate a broader field of dark cloth and bare wood. The differences show how the same kind of setting can produce distinct relationships between a figure, a group and the spectator.

The final painting holds the viewer close enough to see the woman’s wrists but gives no reciprocal meeting of eyes. Her bowed head keeps attention directed towards the lap, while the benches lead attention out into the carriage. That unresolved movement between person and setting is central to the experience of looking. The train provides a place of passage, but Sorolla makes the interval feel prolonged: three figures, a bundle, sunlight on wood, and an expanse of space around a woman under guard.