Madrid's Renewed and Expanded Sorolla Museum Lets the Paintings of the Spanish 'Master of Light' Re-emerge Into Public View

Dedicated to the works of Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, the museum is centered around his historic home and studio. The first phase of its yearslong renovation is complete, featuring expanded exhibition spaces

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent

October 16, 2026 2:01 p.m.

For the first time in two years, the works of one of Spain’s most celebrated painters, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, are back on public display at his namesake museum in Madrid.

The Sorolla Museum partially reopened this week, boasting a nearly 20,000-square-foot expansion. That includes new exhibition spaces, an auditorium and storage for the museum’s 1,394 paintings and roughly 5,000 drawings by Sorolla—the world’s largest collection of his works.

“After the remodeling, the Sorolla Museum will have a new, expansive personality,” Enrique Valera, the museum’s director, tells the Art Newspaper’s Alexandra F. Coego. “We didn’t have a space like this before, and it will allow us to expand our cultural programming for every type of visitor.”

The museum is centered around Sorolla’s home and studio, where the artist, who was born in Valencia in 1863, worked and lived with his family from 1911 until his death in 1923. The museum opened to the public in 1932, after his widow’s death.

The home makes for an enchanting space. “Stepping into the seductive confines of the compound, where Sorolla lived with his wife and three children, is like entering one of the artist’s luminous paintings,” Tony Perrottet wrote for Smithsonian magazine in 2008. “Sorolla’s easels stand ready, as if he had just left for a siesta; his palettes, brushes and half-used paint tubes are close by.”

But because the house was designed for a small family, it struggled to keep up with the demands of being a public museum that, in 2023, the centenary of the artist’s death, saw a record 345,000 visitors. Since the 1930s, the museum has undertaken partial measures to adapt to increased visitation, including redesigning exhibition halls and installing climate control to protect Sorolla’s works. “Nevertheless, all these interventions were only partial in scope,” per the museum’s website.

That changed four years ago, when the museum began an ambitious overhaul and expansion project costing some €13 million (roughly $14.5 million), according to Todo Alicante’s Rocío Mendoza. Work on adjacent properties bought by the Spanish Ministry of Culture began in 2022. The main museum shut its doors in 2024. The expanded galleries are now open, although the house and studio will remain closed for years to come.

“The restoration of the studio home is being carried out with surgical precision and will take years. But the goal is to recover its original essence,” Valera tells Todo Alicante.

The expansion was built with the same architectural spirit as Sorolla’s home studio—an ample use of wood and emphasis on natural light—giving it a cohesive feel with the larger museum. It also lives up to Sorolla’s nickname, “the master of light,” which he earned for his paintings of sparkling beaches and other outdoor scenes.

The expanded museum has an interior courtyard and garden roofs that designers hope will help the space blend in to its residential surroundings. A glass wall in the expanded building, which currently frames a view of the under-construction studio home, will later be converted into a connective threshold that physically and conceptually bridges the museum’s past and present.

The reopened museum’s first temporary exhibition, “Behind the Artist’s House: The Architecture of the Sorolla Museum, 1905–2026,” debuted this month and runs through early January. It tells the story of the house’s design, which Sorolla personally oversaw, and the subsequent evolution of the Sorolla Museum.

“Behind the Artist’s House: The Architecture of the Sorolla Museum, 1905–2026” is on view at the Sorolla Museum in Madrid until January 10, 2027.