Sorolla - Mending Nets (1896) – Ca Pesaro, Venice

This painting is immense! 10 feet wide by 7 feet tall and it hangs in a palace on the Grand Canal that is now home to Venice’s modern art museum. Seeing it is a visual and sensory experience… it seems like you should grab hold and start to work before someone turns around and tells you to stop gawking and get busy!

Sorolla is one of the most eminent painters of sunlight – ever. His works live and breathe with the passing moment. It isn’t what the people are doing, it isn’t the subject matter he chooses (no matter how well done they are!) – Its the way he handles the warms and cools (yellow and blue tones) within the painting that gives us this magic feeling of reality. It’s as if this guy dipped his brush into the very sunlight itself

http://www.gailsauter.com/a-painter-on-painting/2009/3/26/sorolla-master-of-sunlight.html