Jaime García Banús
1892.Room 060
Sorolla demonstrated during his entire artistic career a clear interest in child models – amongst his favourites were his own relatives – whom he copied directly from life without being bound to the compulsory pose of conventional portraits. Therefore, in his paintings of children he was able to unleash all his skills employed in his most private and mature work. He captured with extraordinary vividness the typical spontaneity of children, thus becoming one of the Spanish artists of his time that best knew how to capture models of such a young age. This painting, furthermore, is an unusual and valuable example within his work. Instead of seeking the child’s expressive naturalness, little Jaime seems to pose like an adult, with an absent expression and a certainly motionless posture. With his hand over a blue ball with a red cross, he even resembles some images of the Christ Child as Saviour of the World. This exceptional work – currently in the Museo del Prado – is characteristic of the Valencian artist’s early period of naturalistic realism, which was the trend back then.
The painting’s greatest feature lies in the overlapping of white hues in both the background and the figure, employing a delicate technique of overlapped glazes intended to satisfy the exquisite refinement demanded by the bourgeois taste of the time. This emphasis on the use of white –which imbues the painting with blinding illumination – seems to herald the substantial importance that the capture of natural light would play throughout the Valencian master’s future works. This portrait – which was produced seven years before the García Banús family moved from Valencia to Madrid – has a specific meaning in Sorolla’s personal universe. As the warm dedicatory signature reveals, this painting was intended to remain within the context for which it was executed, amongst the set of family portraits that included Jaime’s sister, his parents and his grandparents. Jaime García Banús – Sorolla’s nephew-in-law – was son of María Banús and Antonio García del Castillo, brother of Clotilde (the painter’s wife). He was from a family full of brilliant liberal Spanish intellectuals. His two brothers stood out: scientists Antonio (1888–1955) and Mario. Antonio was a chemistry professor at the University of Barcelona, where he was vice-chancellor, and after the Spanish Civil War he went into exile in Colombia, where he founded the Chemistry Department in Bogotá and Los Andes. Mario was a biology professor at Yale University. His sister María Teresa (1895–1989) was a committed feminist whose husband, editor Juan de Andrade, founded the Spanish Communist Party in 1920 and the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification in 1935. The subject of the portrait inherited his name from his maternal grandfather, Jaime Banús y Castell, a Valencian scholar of Neuro-histology and Experimental Psychology who was seemingly admired by the famous doctor Luis Simarro, a close friend of Sorolla’s.
G. Navarro, C., El niño Jaime García Banús (1892). En: Barón, J.: El retrato español en el Prado. De Goya a Sorolla, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2007, p.182, n. 64
