The Tunny Catch

The fish fill the foreground before there is room to take in the river. Huge, overlapping bodies lie across the lower edge of Joaquín Sorolla’s The Tunny Catch, their curved backs catching streaks of silver, blue and green. Workers bend towards them under a broad yellow awning. Beyond the shelter, boats and rigging interrupt a stretch of brilliant water. The picture moves between the heavy catch within reach and the open distance behind it, joining the physical effort of handling tuna to a spacious view of the waterfront.

Painted in 1919, the work is also known by its Spanish title, Ayamonte. La pesca del atún. It belongs to the Hispanic Society Museum & Library in New York and was the final panel completed for Sorolla’s Vision of Spain. The Museo Sorolla’s catalogue Sorolla. Arte de la luz identifies it as inventory A1812, an oil on canvas measuring 349 × 485 cm. The same dimensions and accession appear in the official Spanish loan schedule published in 2009, which records the work in two pieces. Its expansive format gives fish, people and harbour space the presence of a large architectural scene.^[1][2][3]

A catch already brought ashore

The English word “tunny” means tuna. Yet the painting’s title needs to be read alongside the activity Sorolla actually shows. This is a scene of fish being handled at the waterfront, with boats close behind. The struggle of enclosing a catch in nets is outside the picture. The immediate work concerns the weight and movement of fish that have already been caught.

The tuna are substantial forms rather than a scatter of small objects. Their bodies overlap so closely that individual outlines sometimes disappear into the heap. One broad back leads the eye across another; a pointed fin or dark head breaks the succession of rounded surfaces. The crop at the bottom extends the mass beyond the frame. Viewers cannot stand apart and count the catch neatly, because the arrangement puts them almost at its edge.

At the centre, a worker in muted clothing bends deeply forward, his legs set apart among the fish. Another, wearing a pale shirt and yellow trousers, reaches across the catch nearby. Their inclinations turn the bodies of the workers into a second series of diagonals. The fish remain low and largely horizontal, while shoulders, arms and bent knees register the effort required to shift them. Neither figure needs an emphatic facial expression: posture carries the action.

Sorolla sets this movement against a quieter upright group on the right. White clothing makes these figures conspicuous, while the vertical support beside them provides a firm division within the busy waterfront. A raised arm and a turned body keep the group connected to the surrounding activity. The contrast is between bodily positions: bending and standing, reaching down and looking across. It gives the foreground several tempos rather than one repeated gesture.^[1]

The awning and the open river

The canopy occupies a broad strip across the top of the composition. Its warm colour binds the width of the painting, but its surface is interrupted by seams, cords and a conspicuous pale opening or fold towards the left. Beneath it, posts and rigging create a loose framework. Some lines stand nearly upright; others rise sharply from the boats. Together they prevent the broad spaces of cloth and water from becoming empty bands.

The strongest horizontal division lies between the sheltered work area and the river beyond. The water is bright enough to make the darker boats legible as a succession of edges, yet those edges do not close the view. Light continues through the gaps. The far shore is a narrow, restrained strip, allowing most of the depth to be carried by water and air rather than elaborate distant architecture.

The sheltered foreground has plenty of colour of its own. The tuna are streaked with cool hues; the ground around them contains warm pinks and reddish passages; pale shirts and trousers catch reflected light. Shade does not reduce the scene to a set of dark silhouettes. It creates a different register of illumination within which the mass of fish remains readable.

The Museo Sorolla catalogue describes this arrangement as a kind of false backlighting: sunlight falls on the water behind the figures, while the foreground is protected by the awning. It also connects the cloth’s transparency with effects Sorolla had explored in sails.^[1] The brilliant distance supplies the sensation of glare, but the near objects retain enough light and colour to hold attention.

The awning also establishes the viewer’s position. We look from under its shelter towards the exposed water. Its lower edge behaves almost like a second frame inside the painting, keeping the distant prospect at the level of the figures and boats. The resulting space feels occupied and usable. Looking into the harbour means looking through the structures and people who use it.

Painting beside the Feu factory

Florencio de Santa Ana’s account reproduces Sorolla’s letter to Clotilde of 10 June 1919: he painted inside the Feu tuna factory, beside a door onto the river, working directly from boats, water, people and fish. Four borrowed tuna required urgent study before heat spoiled them. Santa Ana also records alternating rain, little sun and intense heat.^[4]

Drawing, arrangement and direct observation

Santa Ana dates the supplies’ arrival to 28 May and drawing to 30 May; composition was resolved by 2 June, also documented in the Museo Sorolla catalogue.^[1][4]

A surviving sheet in the Museo Sorolla gives this preparation a smaller, more intimate scale. The museum catalogues Barca, Ayamonte; Estudio de figura, inventory 10740, as a preparatory drawing for the panel. Made in compound pencil on paper, it measures 14.5 × 18.6 cm. The record describes a boat’s stern on one side and, on the reverse, a mariner seen from behind, leaning forward while holding a post. The museum dates it within the Ayamonte campaign, from 14 May to 29 June 1919.^[5] These are studies of a vessel and a bodily position, the kinds of individual problem that the large waterfront composition had to bring together.

The apparent bustle does not prevent a strong order. The two bending workers hold the central foreground; the standing figures steady the right; smaller people and boats lead towards the middle distance. The canopy joins them all without turning the scene into a rigidly symmetrical tableau.

The boat structures make that order particularly lively. Their crossing spars and cords could easily fragment the view, but the bright water keeps their shapes distinct. Long sloping lines lift the eye away from the fish, then return it towards another figure or post. The viewer can move through the image along several routes. Its complexity comes from these overlapping paths, while the canopy and river hold the overall shape together.

Ayamonte and the Portuguese shore

Santa Ana connects Ayamonte’s Guadiana frontier setting with Sorolla’s interest in including neighbouring Portugal. He identifies the distant shore and some people within the gathering as Portuguese.^[4]

In the finished picture, the far shore is present without dominating. It is a low line across the water, almost the opposite of the immense bodies pressed towards the viewer. The nearby waterfront opens towards land across the river. The distinctive relationship between working waterfront and opposite shore gives the gathering its geographical setting.

Clothing helps distinguish the groups, but it also serves the painting’s structure. Pale shirts, yellow trousers, muted working clothes and the conspicuous whites at the right establish intervals of colour and light. Dark hats and heads punctuate those larger shapes. Sorolla makes different figures legible in a crowded setting without requiring each to become a separate portrait. Their shared space is defined by boats, catch, shelter and water.

The final panel of Vision of Spain

Blanca Pons-Sorolla’s account of the series places Ayamonte: The Tuna Catch last in its order of execution, in 1919.^[6] In the correspondence Santa Ana reproduces, a letter of 29 June anticipates finishing that day; a same-day telegram confirms the last brushstroke completed panel and commission. Sorolla stayed until 7 July while the canvas dried.^[4]

Within the fourteen-panel ensemble, the picture gives maritime work a substantial place alongside festivals, markets and ceremonies. Its scale brings the lifting and shifting of fish into the same monumental register as the series’ more formal gatherings. The panels were commissioned by Archer Milton Huntington in 1911 for the Hispanic Society and were inaugurated together in New York in 1926.^[3] Seen within that surrounding cycle, Ayamonte contributes a particularly close encounter with the materials and spaces of work.

It also returns to a concern visible in Sorolla’s earlier Sewing the Sail: a shared maritime task organised around a great expanse of fabric. In the earlier painting the sail spreads through the foreground among the people tending it. At Ayamonte, cloth rises overhead and makes a shelter for another kind of labour. In both, fabric becomes a means of shaping light and connecting a group, though its position and purpose differ.

Practical uses give the painting its structure. The fish supply both the work to be done and the great curved forms across the foreground. Boats provide transport and a network of sloping lines. The awning shelters the gathering and gives the scene its warm upper boundary. Sorolla makes the waterfront comprehensible through these ordinary uses, while the bright water draws the eye continually beyond them.