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On long term display at the Hispanic Society, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida’s monumental, site-specific series of 14 paintings known as Vision of Spain is one of the crown jewels of the collection. Archer Milton Huntington, founder of the Hispanic Society, commissioned the paintings in 1911 for a new gallery to be built on the west side of the main building. Sorolla, the preeminent painter in Spain at the turn of the 20th century, already had been the subject of two enormously successful traveling exhibitions in the United States organized by the Hispanic Society in 1909 and 1911. The 1909 exhibition alone attracted some 160,000 visitors to the Hispanic Society in a period of one month.

Nearly 12 feet tall and 200 feet in combined length, the canvases that comprise Vision of Spain were painted by Sorolla at various locations in Spain between 1912 and 1919. Within the gallery the viewer is surrounded by the peoples, costumes, and traditions of various regions of Spain. Both Sorolla and Huntington noted that the series represented a Spain that was already “on the point of disappearing.” Unfortunately the paintings that Sorolla considered his greatest work were not inaugurated at the Hispanic Society until 1926, three years after the artist’s death.

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