The Skipping Rope

The small space between a shoe and its shadow supplies the drama of Joaquín Sorolla’s The Skipping Rope. A girl hangs above a sunlit path, her dark stockings cutting across the pale ground, her skirt swinging out around her knees. Behind her, other children occupy the far and near sides of a round pond. Trees stand upright through the activity, giving the moving figures something firm to turn against. The painting brings the eye close to an action that will have changed before the next step.

Painted at La Granja de San Ildefonso in summer 1907, Saltando a la comba, La Granja belongs to the Museo Sorolla’s founding bequest, inventory 797. It measures 105 by 166 centimetres: oil on coarse canvas with white priming. The museum identifies Elena, Sorolla’s youngest daughter, in front, and the blonde child behind as Susan, or Susana, daughter of Leonard Williams.^[1] These names place a family relationship within the scene, while the picture gives most of its attention to bodies moving through a garden.

A leap across the foreground

Elena’s figure is large enough to read at once but complicated enough to hold attention. Her head turns towards the left, and the red accent behind it carries the eye out towards the back of the neck. Below, the dress widens into a bell of broken blue, violet and pale strokes. The legs make an uneven pair of diagonals: one drops towards the path, while the other bends back. Their different angles give the leap its particular shape. The action is more convincing because the body does not settle into a tidy, balanced emblem of jumping.

The dress participates in that imbalance. Around the torso, darker passages interrupt the light fabric. Lower down, long strokes pull across and down the skirt, making its surface seem to change direction as it opens. The hem swings away from the legs and leaves the dark stockings sharply exposed. Fabric provides a second account of the movement, spreading more broadly than the narrow limbs beneath it. The contrast between the skirt’s breadth and the slender legs is one of the most effective relationships in the picture.

A little lower and to the right, the shadow gathers into a dark irregular shape. It is legible enough to belong to the jumping figure, but its edges break apart against the path. Nearby, another large shadow runs from the foreground tree towards the lower edge. Those two kinds of shadow give different information. The tree’s long shape extends a stable object across the ground; the girl’s detached patch makes a brief movement visible. Looking between them allows the earth itself to become part of the action.

The rope is much less conspicuous than the title might suggest. It does not form a heavy outline enclosing Elena. The bent limbs, spreading skirt and lifted shoes carry the movement even where the thin cord is difficult to follow. That unequal distribution of detail matters. Sorolla makes the activity readable through the strongest shapes, while allowing the small implement that names it to remain a fleeting mark.

Going around the pond

The garden gives the children a route. The pond occupies a broad oval across the middle of the canvas, its rim turning away from the viewer and returning towards the foreground. A girl at the left appears partly screened by the large tree trunk. Beyond the water, smaller pale figures are spaced across the upper part of the picture. Their changing sizes make the distance easy to grasp, but their separation also creates a rhythm: large near figure, interrupted figure at the left, small figures beyond.

That foreground trunk is particularly assertive. It descends through nearly the whole height of the scene and blocks a portion of the pond. Its pale, mottled surface has a solidity quite different from the soft dabs of the foliage behind. The tree prevents us from surveying the children as an evenly arranged group. We look past an obstruction, discovering one figure close to its left edge and another in the open space to its right. The scene feels encountered from a particular position on the path.

The water introduces a slower visual register. Its dark green surface contains vertical reflections and patches of yellow light, with a dark fountain form rising near the centre. The pool is enclosed and comparatively still beside the busy skirts and feet. Its curved edge gives those broken movements a continuous shape to circle. At the same time, the horizontal breadth of the water keeps the scene open across the canvas. The eye can travel around it without losing the foreground leap.

Above the pool, narrow trunks and dark hedging divide the background into repeated upright and horizontal elements. A thin band of red flowers supplies a bright accent near the top. The children’s pale clothing interrupts these darker bands. Distance therefore arrives through changes in colour and scale as well as through the pond’s receding edge. The background retains enough structure to locate the game without demanding the same attention as Elena’s silhouette.

Light under the trees

The largest unbroken bright area lies beneath and around the jumping girl. Elsewhere, the ground passes through patches of shade, warm earth and small pale strokes. This variety makes the path feel unevenly illuminated. It also affects the weight of the figures. Elena’s dark legs stand out against light ground; the children beyond the pond emerge in pale touches against darker vegetation. The contrast reverses as the eye moves from front to back.

White clothing changes accordingly. The near-left child’s dress is broken by cool notes and surrounding shadow. The far figures are reduced to compact light shapes. Elena’s dress carries more visible pattern and a wider range of dark marks. These differences let Sorolla distinguish distance and movement without giving every face or hand equal definition. The picture invites us to see a group in action before examining the particulars of each person.

The wide format is crucial to this experience. It leaves room for an expanse of empty path beside Elena, and for the pond to extend behind her. On a narrow canvas the leap might become a study of a single pose. Here it belongs to an environment with its own intervals, obstacles and repeated forms. The open ground is active space: it gives the lifted body room to register, the shadow somewhere to fall, and the viewer a clear passage towards the water.

Family painting at La Granja

A different balance between person and setting appears in María at La Granja, another oil painting of 1907, now in the San Diego Museum of Art.^[2] María stands nearly the full height of a narrow canvas, wearing a long white dress and a broad hat. Her clothes form an extended upright shape, while angled bands of light cross the path around her. The garden supplies a changing surface against which the standing figure remains clearly held.

In The Skipping Rope, the figure’s relationship to the ground is more precarious. Elena’s shorter skirt exposes the moving legs, and the visible interval beneath her feet makes contact with the path uncertain for an instant. María’s boots conclude a long downward fall of fabric; Elena’s shoes punctuate an outward swing. The two paintings show how much Sorolla could change a family picture through format, clothing and the placing of feet. The garden accommodates both sustained portraiture and a passing action.

Leonard Williams also connects the personal setting to the painting’s early reception. His family shared that summer at La Granja with the Sorollas, according to the museum.^[1] In his writing, later collected in Eight Essays on Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, Williams includes girls with skipping ropes among the subjects through which he celebrates Sorolla’s range. His catalogue of subjects moves from play to work, people to landscape, and still water to breaking waves. The garden game belongs, in that account, to a much larger interest in visible life.^[3]

Williams’s admiration also helps explain the importance early viewers attached to speed. In the same volume he argues that light, atmosphere and appearances alter continually, making rapid execution essential to truthful painting. This is a critic’s theory of Sorolla’s achievement, expressed with considerable enthusiasm.^[3] It gives a useful historical context for the leap, without establishing how long this particular canvas took to paint. The lasting image contains an action that would have been exceptionally brief.

An instant made into a painting

The resemblance to a photograph is a useful comparison for that arrested action. The museum likewise emphasises its photographic effect.^[1] Yet its arrangement also invites attention to selection. The large tree, the pool’s oval, the repeated pale figures and the clear patch beneath Elena all cooperate in making the movement visible. A fraction of time becomes a substantial composition.

Camille Mauclair had raised a related distinction when discussing Sorolla’s Paris exhibition of 1906. In his essay, reprinted in Eight Essays, he argued that the painter’s achievement involved choosing, synthesising and accentuating what he saw, rather than merely reproducing visible things with patient accuracy.^[4] Written before this garden picture, the argument offers a contemporary way of understanding its apparent immediacy. The leap looks sudden because the painting makes certain relationships exceptionally clear.

The canvas also travelled beyond the family setting. The museum links reverse number 221 to dispatch for London’s Grafton Galleries exhibition in 1908, and numbers 15 and 16 to the Chicago and Saint Louis catalogues of 1911 respectively.^[1] This summer activity thus entered an international exhibition career. Its scale and arrangement gave that small action enough presence to address viewers far from the garden where it began. Even at a distance, the dark legs and the space beneath the shoes make the leap legible; close looking discovers the many touches of colour that keep the surrounding world in motion.