White slave trade

Young women in peasant shawls doze on the hard benches of a train carriage. Only the old woman in black stays awake, watching them. Sorolla painted a quiet scene with a dark subject: girls being taken into prostitution.

The story behind the painting

Joaquin Sorolla painted White Slave Trade, Trata de blancas in Spanish, in 1894 and signed it in 1895. It belongs to a group of pictures made for competitions at a time when social realism was in fashion, and it takes on the theme of prostitution. Wikidata gives the date as 1894, the year it was painted. The canvas measures 166.5 by 195 cm. It is owned by the Sorolla Museum in Madrid and is regularly lent to other museums, among them the Prado.

What to look for

The scene is a railway compartment, recognisable from its benches and the narrow room. A group of young women, dressed as country girls with mantillas and scarves over their heads, seem to have fallen asleep. Only the oldest, dressed in black, stays awake and alert beside them. She watches over the girls, and the source names her role plainly: she is the procuress. Commentators also see the influence of Velazquez in Sorolla's work, alongside his naturalism.

Meaning and intent

The painting sets out to denounce a social wrong. The narrow space, a claustrophobic third-class carriage, stands for imprisonment and for the impossibility of escaping one's fate. The sleeping girls do not know where they are going; the woman in black does. The allusion to prostitution and the sexual exploitation of young women is delicate and veiled, which the French Wikipedia article attributes, without doubt as it says, to the painter's deep piety.

Legacy

The work won a prize at the Paris Salon of 1897, yet it drew heavy criticism. Some Catholics of Sorolla's time judged it harshly, saying the painter was so good that he had stained his fine, brilliant brush with the soot of brothels. For those critics, this canvas and his other works on the theme left an indelible stain on his career. The painting nonetheless travelled: it was lent to a museum in Buenos Aires in 1898, and it still leaves the Sorolla Museum for exhibitions.