Museo Carmen Thyssen

Summer Days. From Sorolla to Hopper

Summer Days. From Sorolla to Hopper

With Lourdes Moreno

Halfway through the 1800s, the bourgeoisie discovered the coast as a new social and leisure setting. It immediately became part of their everyday lives through summer sojourns in spas and beach resorts that combined health tourism with holiday relaxation and socialization.

Enjoyment of the seaside gave rise to new customs such as therapeutic sea-baths and new fashions in clothing, and made terraces, seafront promenades and beachside casinos backdrops for social gatherings. Meanwhile contemporary painters, influenced by Impressionism and eager to depict outdoor subjects that allowed them to explore atmospheric effects, incorporated seaside environments and life into their works.

In Summer Days, the Museo Carmen Thyssen surveys this social phenomenon, which spread across Europe and the United States and became the origin of the mass summer tourism that reached a peak in the twentieth century. The exhibition also shows how the leading Spanish and international artists portrayed and immortalised summer holidaying from the early days to the middle of the last century.