Saturday, May 3, 2025, 00:13
The Patronage of the Alhambra and the Generalife has acquired for 730,000 euros the picture of Joaquín Sorolla ‘Lindaroja Garden’, which portrays an original view of the same name located within the Nasrid monument and to which the great artist dedicated several of his works. Alhambra sources have confirmed the acquisition of this work that, once the last bureaucratic procedures are resolved, will be incorporated into the pictorial collection of the monument. The acquisition procedure of this picture, which has remained in the hands of the Sorolla family so far, culminated at the end of April and will allow the city to have a masterpiece that from the Patronage of the Alhambra consider the “best of all who painted in Granada.”
This is stated in the justification memory of this contract to buy this oil on canvas made in 1909, during the first Granada Pictorial campaign of the artist. It is an original view of the Patio del LiDaraja from the viewpoint of the same name, with its fountain in the first place and picked up, its vegetation around it and its northern forehead to the background, corresponding to the so -called Carlos V or Emperor’s rooms.
Sorolla is a key figure in the art of Spanish painting; Landscape painter full of light, beach scenes, fishermen and sea, developing a pictorial style called ‘luminism’.
Throughout the three Granada campaigns (1909, 1910 and 1917) he painted a large set of 47 views or landscapes, 39 of them on the Alhambra or the Generalife. This set of granadin paintings is an intense nuance of his general work and among them stands out with a rare combination of strength and delicacy this ‘Lindaraja garden, Alhambra, Granada’, a picture that shows the artist’s mastery and the moment of fullness in which he was when he created it.
The second
The work now acquired by the Alhambra Board of Trustees and Generalife was the second that the Valencian master of light dedicated to this concrete corner. In total there would be five works, all different, of which the most extraordinary is, by far, the ‘Lindaraja garden’.
The painting is signed and dated in 1910, although he painted it in 1909, when he prepared them to take them to their second great exhibition in the United States, held in 1911, in the Art Institute of Chicago and in the City Art Museum in San Luis. After that great exhibition in the US, this painting has appeared in the most important exhibitions about the painter, in Valencia, Granada, Madrid, Paris and Ferrara between 1944 and 2022.
The Alhambra justifies this acquisition in order to continue and increase its artistic collection, which lacks artist works of the nineteenth century as important as Mariano Fortuny or Joaquín Sorolla, artists of the first international level and relevant to the monument.
