Rocks at Jávea. The White Boat

Painted in 1905, this coastal view captures a hidden corner of Jávea, a stretch of Spain's Mediterranean shore that Joaquín Sorolla kept coming back to. The rocks tumble toward the water in bright pinks, oranges, and soft purples, catching the full glare of the sun. Beyond them, the sea moves from deep sapphire to glowing turquoise, and a lone white boat drifts in the lower right, tiny but instantly grabbing your eye against all that shimmering water.

Sorolla was nicknamed "the painter of light," and works like this show exactly why he earned it. Rather than fussing over every crack in the rock or ripple in the sea, he chased the sensation of a blazing summer day. His brushwork is fast and loose, with thick dabs of paint sitting right next to one another so you can see the surface almost buzzing with energy. That approach ties him to Impressionism, though his obsession with pure sunlight gives his work its own flavor, sometimes described as Luminism.

Jávea felt like a fresh discovery for the artist that year, and he spent his time there almost like a researcher, studying how light bounced between stone and sea. The finished painting reads less as a tidy record of a place and more as a single warm moment held still, the kind of bright afternoon that lingers long after you have left the coast.