f
wings and sails, which meet us here as in the pagan compositions of
Botticelli?

[Illustration: In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

THE SWIMMERS

_From a painting by Sorolla_]

If we glance at Sorolla's young girls and young boys racing along the
hot beach, or his bathers exulting in their "water joy," we recall at
the same moment the "Primavera" with its swift-stepping nymphs, the
wind gods in the "Birth of Venus," or the "Judith" with her maid
moving rapidly along a flower-strewn path. This joy of motion and this
continual suggestion of youth and vitality form the link that binds
together the so dissimilar ideals of the old and the modern master.
Sorolla's inspiration is by far the simpler. His art reflects the
brilliant sunshine of the Mediterranean coast, the tonic quality of the
fresh air, and the unconventionality of life by the sea. All his people
use natural gestures and express in their activity the untrammeled
energy of primitive life. In looking at these children, and there is
hardly a figure that has not the naivete of childhood, we think less of
the individuals portrayed than of the outdoor freshness of which they
are a part. They are much more spirits of nature than the dryads and
nereids and mermaids conceived by the Germans to express in symbol the
natural forces. Nothing suggests the use of models, all has the look of
spontaneity as though the artist had made his notes in passing, without
the slightest regard to producing a picture, with only the idea of
reproducing life. Life, however, appears in his canvases in a
sufficiently decorative form, although not in the carefully considered
patterns of those artists with whom the decorative instinct is supreme.

Observe, for example, the painting entitled "Sea Idyl." Two children are
stretched on the beach, their bright bodies wet and glistening and
casting blue shadows on the sands. They are lying so close to the
water's edge that the waves lap over them, the boy's skin shines like
polished marble under the wet film just passing across it, and the
girl's drenched garments cling with sharp chiseled folds to the form
beneath like the draperies of some young Greek goddess just risen from
the sea. The insolence of laughing eyes, the idle fumbling of young
hands in the wet sand, the tingling life in the clean-cut limbs, the
buoyancy of the waves that lift them slightly and hold them above the
earth,--all are seen with unwearied eyes, and reproduced with e