Asturian Landscape

A scattering of pale houses climbs a green hillside in Joaquín Sorolla’s Asturian Landscape. Below them, a fringe of trees meets dark water. Their reflections stretch towards the lower edge, where broken strokes of light disturb the surface. The village offers points of brightness, but the painting’s largest and most absorbing subject is the continuous passage between vegetation, shore and reflection.

Painted around 1904, Asturian Landscape, or Paisaje asturiano, belongs to the Brooklyn Museum, accession 14.559. It is an oil on canvas measuring 61.9 × 94.6 centimetres, with the credit line Caroline H. Polhemus Fund.^[1] Its horizontal format gives Sorolla room to follow the hillside across the picture while keeping the opposite bank close. We look across the water and upwards into inhabited country, rather than out towards a distant horizon.

A hillside built from overlapping slopes

The land rises in successive, uneven bands. The lowest is the narrow edge beside the water. Above it, rounded trees partially conceal the slope, while houses, fields and darker strips of vegetation draw the eye further uphill. Finally, a wooded ridge cuts across the sky. These bands never settle into a simple stack: the bank curves, trees project in front of buildings, and the sloping ground pushes diagonally through the horizontal canvas.

The arrangement is particularly clear on the right. A bright group of white walls sits high above a much darker mass of trees. Around the buildings, patches of cultivated ground separate the slope into smaller shapes. The eye can recognise a habitable landscape without resolving every boundary or roof. Sorolla gives these fragments enough definition to establish their differences, then lets colour connect them to their surroundings.

On the left, buildings approach the water more closely. A larger pale façade near the shore makes a strong accent against its brown roof and the surrounding greens. Smaller structures continue up the hill, leading towards the dark trees near the ridge. This irregular chain of architecture supplies a route through the painting. It also makes the distances legible: the houses diminish and become less distinct as they climb away from us.

Light shifts attention from one patch of wall to another, giving each house a place within the wider network of slopes and vegetation. The picture’s sense of settlement comes from these relationships. Architecture is threaded through the hillside, with trees sometimes enclosing it and open ground sometimes setting it apart.

The high ridge limits how far we can see. Only a shallow area of sky remains, widest towards the left, where pale cloud rises behind the darker land. With relatively little sky above and water filling the foreground below, the hillside becomes a substantial presence. Sorolla makes the near landscape occupy the view almost from edge to edge.

The dark structure at the water’s edge

Near the lower left stands a small, dark structure projecting beside the water. Its low roof and upright supports distinguish it from the more distant houses. It resembles a covered landing, positioned where the built shore gives way to the line of trees. Its compact shape anchors the meeting of buildings, vegetation and water.

It is one of the strongest interruptions in the scene. The surrounding bank is irregular, whereas this structure introduces a compact, recognisable geometry. Its darkness draws attention without overwhelming the pale buildings above it. A narrow projection beside it carries the eye sideways across the water, while its vertical elements connect the bank to the reflection beneath.

This detail brings the opposite shore within reach. The hillside might otherwise read as a broad pattern of green and ochre. The landing-like structure gives the viewer something smaller and more tangible against which to judge that larger setting. It also keeps the waterfront from becoming an uninterrupted decorative strip.

The bank continues to the right through alternating light and dark passages. Small exposed patches separate the trees from the water, but elsewhere their shadows and reflections nearly join. The edge is distinct enough to establish the land, yet soft enough for the eye to move repeatedly between the solid forms above and their unstable counterparts below.

Water that changes the landscape

The water occupies roughly the lower third of the picture. It is subdued in colour, carrying greens and browns from the bank, with lighter grey and silvery marks across the surface. Its darkness gives the houses greater brilliance. It also adds weight beneath the hillside, balancing the thinner strip of pale sky.

The reflections preserve the broad arrangement of the shore while loosening its forms. Beneath the central trees, deep vertical shapes descend into the water. Elsewhere, warmer fragments recall the exposed earth and buildings above. These colours are interrupted by horizontal strokes, so the reflected landscape can never become an exact duplicate of the solid one.

That difference creates the painting’s quiet movement. Above the bank, the trees rise in rounded, uneven masses. Below it, their forms are pulled downwards and broken sideways. The viewer recognises the connection between the two areas, then notices how differently Sorolla has handled them. A tree becomes both a volume standing on the shore and a changeable arrangement of marks in the water.

Towards the bottom, pale strokes appear more detached from the objects they might reflect. They spread across the dark surface in short runs and bends. Their breadth helps bring the water forward: the distant hillside contains many small incidents, while the nearest surface is expressed through larger, more open marks. The shift in handling contributes to depth as much as the diminishing houses do.

The surface is gently disturbed rather than mirror-still. Its broken reflections allow the bank to remain recognisable while making the foreground active. Sorolla holds these two effects together. The land appears settled and substantial; the water continually revises its appearance.

Green, white and a restrained light

Green is the dominant colour, but it performs several different jobs. The higher slopes contain lighter and warmer passages; the trees along the bank gather into deeper, cooler masses. Brown earth, reddish roofs and muted ochres break up that range. These changes prevent the hillside from flattening into one continuous field of colour.

The darkest trees have particular force because they stand close to the water and overlap the rising ground. Their rounded crowns supply large shapes against the smaller, more angular architecture. A few lighter touches suggest the changing faces of their foliage. Sorolla leaves much of their interior shadow intact, giving them a density that the houses and open fields do not have.

White walls become small concentrations of light within this darker setting. They do not require extensive architectural detail to catch the eye. A few bright planes beside a roof or a patch of shadow can establish a whole building. The houses on the upper right are especially effective: their pale surfaces are separated from the foreground water by a broad depth of green.

The cloud at the upper left introduces another kind of brightness, softer and less sharply bounded. It keeps the sky from becoming a blank strip and offsets the dark rise of the ridge. Across the canvas, light appears through these different relationships: softened in the cloud, concentrated on walls and scattered over the water. Its effect depends on the surrounding tones rather than on a single dazzling expanse.

Sorolla’s northern landscape

Asturias formed part of Sorolla’s sustained attention to northern Spain. In an essay for the Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga, Bárbara García Menéndez places his first stay in western Asturias in the summer of 1902. She records that he made numerous small colour studies as well as larger work, and visited the Asturian painter Tomás García Sampedro, a fellow student from his time in Rome.^[2] The Brooklyn painting’s approximate date places it close to this period of northern exploration.^[1]

That context helps explain the range of subjects contained within the word “landscape”: inhabited slopes, vegetation, architecture and water could all offer Sorolla different problems of colour and distance. Here, the green hillside has enough variety to sustain a whole composition. Its houses provide a human scale even though no prominently described person directs the scene.

In Around Segovia, a strongly cut foreground slope and a dark line of trees make the terrain feel abrupt. In Asturian Landscape, the opposite bank is approached across water, and the hillside is assembled through gentler overlaps. Both pictures give large areas to dark vegetation and articulate the ground through broad patches of colour. Their different foregrounds change how the viewer enters the land: one exposes its solid, angled surfaces; the other gives us a moving reflection before we reach the shore.

The attraction of Asturian Landscape lies in that double experience. From a distance, houses and trees hold their places within a coherent hillside. Looking more closely, the small pale walls, the dark covered structure and the broken water marks assert their individual rhythms. Sorolla gives the view both a firm geography of rising ground and a foreground in which colour slips free of its shapes.