A Spanish Painter in the White House: Joaquín Sorolla’s Portrait of President William Howard Taft (1909)

Abstract

[EN] In April 1909, the 27 th President of the United States, William Howard Taft, was portrayed at the White House by the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, whose recent overwhelming success at the Hispanic Society of America exhibition in New York had led the Taft family to commission the portrait. The aim of this article is to reconstruct this episode in the life of Sorolla and President Taft basing on primary documental material and to analyze the resulting portrait within the context of the beginning of Taft's term in office, as well as to compare it with another Taft´s portrait painted in 1911 by the Swedish artist Anders Zorn. Although various authors have hinted at the similarities between the two portraits, the article dedicates much attention to the differences, which reveal the originality of the portrait by Sorolla, now in the Taft Museum in Cincinnati. [ES] En abril de 1909, el 27º Presidente de los Estados Unidos, William Howard Taft, fue retratado en la Casa Blanca por el pintor español Joaquín Sorolla, cuyo reciente y arrollador éxito en la exposición de la Hispanic Society of America en Nueva York había llevado a la familia Taft a encargarle el retrato. El objetivo del artículo es reconstruir este episodio de la vida de Sorolla y del presidente Taft a partir de fuentes primarias, así como situar el retrato objeto de estudio en el contexto del inicio del mandato de Taft y del panorama sociopolítico de entonces. Para ello, se ha realizado un análisis comparativo con otro retrato del presidente Taft pintado en 1911 por el artista sueco Anders Zorn, lo que revela la originalidad del retrato de Sorolla, actualmente en el Museo Taft de Cincinnati.