Le Saut à la corde

Joaquín Sorolla · 1911

A girl leaps over a whirling rope in the shade of plane trees, and behind her a small child in white jumps too. Sorolla caught a summer afternoon in a royal park as if he had a camera in his hand.

The story behind the painting

The story of the painting begins with a royal commission. Joaquín Sorolla and his family moved for a summer to La Granja de San Ildefonso, near Segovia, at the request of King Alfonso XIII, so that Sorolla could paint the King's portrait in hussar uniform. During that stay he painted this scene. The sources disagree about the date: the French Wikipedia article says the canvas was made in the summer of 1907 at Valsaín, while Wikidata gives 1911. The painting measures 105 by 166 cm, and its Spanish title places it at La Granja.

What to look for

A group of children play in a park. In the foreground a girl jumps rope. Just behind her a plane tree marks off the space. Further back, a small child in white is also jumping rope in front of a pool of water, around which two other young children are running. In the distance you can make out plane trunks and a hedge of red flowers that hide the rest of the setting. According to the painter's records the scene is the park of the Royal Palace at La Granja, and it probably shows members of his family: his wife Clotilde García del Castillo, the teenage Elena and the eldest, María.

Meaning and intent

As often with Sorolla, the work reflects the influence of photography, which he had studied when young. Here, the source suggests, the painting also seems to draw on the work of Étienne-Jules Marey, who had recently fixed movement on a photographic plate, an experiment that had a wide echo among painters at the start of the century. The Giverny museum also points to the influence of Degas. The result is a picture about motion caught in an instant: a body in the air, a rope mid-swing, children running, all the light and play of a summer day frozen without losing its life.

Legacy

The Skipping Rope belongs to a rich group of works Sorolla painted during his stay at La Granja, including The Queen's Bath, Palace Stairway, Trees in Autumn, Garden, Palace, María in the Gardens at La Granja, The Bath and Naked Child, among others. Storm in the Pine Forest was painted at the same period at Valsaín. Today the painting is in the Sorolla Museum in Madrid. It was discussed in the teaching materials for the exhibition Sorolla, a Spanish Painter in Paris at the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny.