The Saddest Waste: Disability, Heredity, and the Artist's Eye

Joaquín Sorolla enjoyed great success at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris. The Spanish painter's ¡Triste herencia! (Sad Inheritance) won both the Grand Prix and a medal of honor. After his nomination to the French Legion d'Honneur, he won another medal a year later at the National Exhibition in Madrid. Sorolla was 37. Born in Valencia, he had studied in Madrid, Rome and Paris. He was already an established artist, and this painting from 1899 brought him greater fame, although it is less well known today.

"Master of Light," an exhibition held in Milan in 2022, sought to introduce the public to Sorolla's work. The enormous canvas ¡Triste herencia! had a wall to itself. Smaller paintings in the room displayed Sorolla's interest in the juxtaposition of sunlight, water and children's bodies. Niño durmiendo en la barca (Nap on the Boat, 1895) shows a barefoot child in rough clothing asleep in the shade of a sail, probably on a fishing boat. Mediodía en la playa de Valencia (Midday on Valencia Beach, 1904) features three children; its impressionistic treatment of light, shadow and reflection makes it unclear whether they are walking on sand or in water.

Yet the room's centerpiece, ¡Triste herencia!, is very different (see painting). Rather than a peacefully sleeping child who may be exhausted by hard work, or three children enjoying a holiday, it shows more than 20 naked boys bathing in the sea under the supervision of a priest in a black cassock. In the foreground are children who have not yet entered the water, some visibly disabled: two use crutches to move across the sand, and another appears blind, reaching out a hand for guidance. At least one of the boys already in the water also uses a crutch.

All the children look sickly and thin, their bodies pale against the golden-brown sand. Writing in 1901, critic Aureliano de Beruete observed, "In this canvas we see a priest from the Congregation of San Juan de Dios bathing a group of degenerate children, blind, crippled, lame, leprous, in short, children with every kind of disease: the refuse that society has cast from its bosom and that this charitable institution has gathered and protected." Another critic, William Starkweather, writing for Sorolla's major New York exhibition in 1909, described the children as "the outcast children of wretched parents. Most are crippled, some bear the stigma of idiocy, and many are completely blind."

Beruete's catalogue of misery echoes Sorolla's own account of how he created the painting: "One day, while absorbed in one of my studies of fishing in Valencia, I saw in the distance several naked children in and beside the sea, watched over by the powerful figure of a priest. They appeared to be residents of the San Juan de Dios hospital, society's saddest waste: the blind, the insane, the crippled and the leprous. I cannot tell you how deeply I was moved, so much so that I wasted no time obtaining permission to work on the spot, and there, by the water's edge, I painted my picture."

This painting, ¡Triste herencia!, has appeared several times in the medical literature. In 2012, Martínez-Lage and colleagues discussed it from a neurological perspective in Child's Nervous System, linking it to "the consequences of the polio (poliomyelitis) outbreak that had struck the Valencia region a few years earlier." In 2021, Joseph wrote in the Journal of Pediatric Orthopaedics that "Sorolla unknowingly painted children with post-polio paralysis for the first time"! He commented on how admirably the painter captured "wasting of the thigh and calf muscles" in the child supported by the priest, and on "the excessive flexion of the right knee and plantar-flexed position of the right ankle, with failure of the toes to clear a mound of sand during the swing phase of gait, indicating paralysis of the child's tibialis anterior muscle."

But why "sad inheritance"? And why "refuse," "waste" and "wretched parents"? Joseph's word "unknowingly" referred to Sorolla's own misunderstanding of the pathophysiology he depicted. The painting's original title was Niños de placer (Children of Pleasure), and both titles implied that these unhealthy, institutionalized children had been disabled by their parents' sins: most likely, that they were suffering from the effects of congenital syphilis. Sorolla did not realize that he was painting post-polio paralysis; he saw the children's condition as a moral issue. "Society's saddest waste" was indeed a social issue: the tragic inheritance was the parents' sins visited upon their sons.

Sorolla's contemporaries also understood the painting as depicting congenital syphilis. When the exhibition opened in New York in 1909, the Newark Evening News described it as follows: "Dozens of idiotic or crippled children, their anatomical deformities skillfully portrayed, the abandoned children of immoral and unknown parents, are gathered around the good priest whose life is devoted to alleviating the suffering caused by their parents' sins."

Other paintings by Sorolla also conveyed social and political messages. Trata de blancas (White Slave Trade, 1894) showed four young prostitutes on a train, watched over by an older woman; ¡Otra Margarita! (Another Margarita!, 1892) portrayed a handcuffed woman arrested for killing her illegitimate child; and ¡Aún dicen que el pescado es caro! (And They Still Say Fish Is Expensive!, 1894) depicted a badly injured young man on a fishing boat. But after ¡Triste herencia!, Sorolla felt he was finished with painful, difficult subjects. According to Starkweather, in 1909 he said, "I suffered so much. I will never do it again."

An orthopedist might celebrate the accuracy of Sorolla's observations of muscular pathophysiology and gait abnormalities, while a pediatrician might wonder whether the painter recognized polio as an infectious threat. If these children had been struck by a polio epidemic, the painting could still protest a society that cast aside sick or disabled children, but heredity and wretched parents would have had nothing to do with their condition. Polio epidemics were relatively new in Europe and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the disease's characteristics were still being understood. In Stockholm, 6 years after the painting was completed, Dr. Ivar Wickman established that polio was infectious.

Congenital syphilis, by contrast, had long been understood as hereditary: in 1529, Paracelsus noted its transmission from father to son. Norwegian artist Edvard Munch painted The Inheritance in 1897-99, depicting a weeping mother holding a baby. Munch had examined a teaching collection of anatomical wax models in Paris and portrayed the infant with hydrocephalus, a bulging forehead, frail limbs and a rash on the chest.

Sorolla painted pathophysiology from life, recording it faithfully enough to impress an orthopedist. Yet his moral lesson rested on a mistaken diagnostic theory. The children he described and painted were outcasts: the blind, the insane, the crippled and the leprous. He blamed their parents, believing they had engaged in immoral sexual acts and bequeathed suffering and pain to these "children of pleasure." Interestingly, Sorolla had lost his own parents to cholera in 1865, when he was only 2, at a time when that disease could already be definitively linked to an infectious microorganism.

Sorolla was not wrong about the harm syphilis could cause. Untreated congenital disease, for which there was then no effective treatment, can indeed cause skeletal damage, optic atrophy, blindness and neurological problems including paralysis. However, the patterns of muscle wasting and paralysis he recorded provide more specific diagnostic information to medical observers in the 21st century. Sorolla's view of his subjects and his intended social protest recall the many ways medicine has blamed patients, or their parents, over the centuries. The painting also offers a broader social moral about the marginalization of disabled children: "the refuse that society has cast from its bosom," "the saddest waste."

Yet the painting gives these marginalized children a moment of joy. However much the painter suffered in recording it, this is not a moment of suffering for them. As Sorolla documented the damage to their bodies, he painted them making their way from the sandy beach toward the shimmering water. He captured them between sea and sky, in a moment of recreation when they could simply be children. He may have intended a profound social statement, but he also painted a moment of grace.

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