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On February 23 1908 Joaquín Sorolla wrote a long letter to his wife Clotilde García del Castillo from Seville, filling her in on the details of the affair that had kept him there since the beginning of the month: a portrait of Queen Victoria Eugenia. He told her how he occupied himself between sitting and sitting by painting other portraits and the many gardens in the city, unforgiving of any waste of time. Preserved at the Sorolla Museum, this letter was no rare event. In fact, husband and wife wrote to each other every day when the artist’s projects forced him to travel away from home. In the closing paragraph, Sorolla wrote: “now I’ve told you all about my life today. It’s monotonous, but what can one do? I always say the same: painting and loving you, there is nothing else. Does that seem little to you?” In one way this sentence sums up Joaquín Sorolla’s life, a prolific artist fond of his family and passionately given over to his work, far removed from the cliché of the bohemian painter.