MURA · THE COLLECTION · JOAQUÍN SOROLLA Y BASTIDA

Rocks at the Lighthouse, Biarritz

Rocks at the Lighthouse, Biarritz is an oil painting by the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida from 1906, made on the Atlantic coast of south-western France. It measures 61.5 by 103.2 cm and came to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1986 as the bequest of Maribel G. Blum.

Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida · 1906 · Oil on canvas · 20th Century · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

A stretch of rocky shore below the lighthouse at Biarritz. The catalogue entry describes white dresses and summer light moving between the rocks and shallow water. Biarritz lies on the Bay of Biscay in the French Basque Country; its white lighthouse, 44 metres tall, was built in 1834 on the cape of Saint Martin, and the town became a fashionable resort after Empress Eugénie built a palace on the beach in 1854.

How it was painted

Sorolla was born in Valencia in 1863 and orphaned two years later. He studied in Madrid and Rome, and a stay in Paris in 1885 gave him his first exposure to modern painting. In 1906, the year of this canvas, a special exhibition of nearly 500 of his works at the Galeries Georges Petit in Paris, including recent sun-drenched beach scenes, eclipsed all his earlier successes and led to his appointment as Officer of the Legion of Honour. The picture was shown in Berlin in 1907 and at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1908, where it was catalogued as The Lighthouse Rocks, Biarritz. In England that year Sorolla met Archer Milton Huntington, who invited him to exhibit at the Hispanic Society of America in New York in 1909; that show contained 356 paintings, of which 195 sold, and this was among them, as Rocas del Faro, Biarritz. Sorolla suffered a stroke in 1920 and died in 1923.

Where it went

Sorolla sold the painting in 1909 to Stephen Carlton Clark, Sr. of New York. It later belonged to Maribel G. Blum of Miami Beach and Chicago, who owned it by 1975 and bequeathed it to the Art Institute on her death in 1985; it entered the collection in 1986. It was reproduced in the volume Eight Essays on Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, published in New York in 1909, and is listed in Bernardino de Pantorba's 1970 catalogue of the artist. The museum lists no current gallery for it.

Why it is in Mura

It belongs to Mura's Impressionist Life collection with a luminous mood: summer at the water's edge.