LONDON, ENGLAND.- Sotheby’s fourth annual sale of Spanish paintings will include over 70 works by the most celebrated artists of the period 1850-1930. Estimated to make in excess of £7 million, the sale brings together works from a vast number of schools and regions all of which, in spite of their diversity, are united by a common theme: the celebration of the land from which they draw their inspiration. The sale will take place at Sotheby’s in London on Tuesday, November 18, 2003.

Chief among the highlights of the sale is one of the finest works by Valencian artist Joaquín Sorolla ever to have come to auction. Estimated at £3,000,000 -£4,000,000, Sorolla’s La Hora del Baño (The Bathing Hour, 1904) combines some of the artist’s most potent images into a composition of epic proportions. Set on the beach at Valencia, the painting includes all the elements that characterise Sorolla’s most celebrated works. The sea, the intense light, the children, oxen and fishermen - all are part of the visual vocabulary that, from the 1890s onwards, he used to celebrate the beauties of life in his native Valencia.

Sorolla’s enthusiasm for painting en plein air on the beaches of his native Valencia is well documented. In one of his many letters to his wife Clotilde, he wrote: "Today I have continued drawing. Every time I am more enamoured with nature, so much that between the sea and the splendid sun I think my happiest days are those on the beach." Similarly, the boldness and fluency with which Sorolla handles his subject shows the kind of mastery that prompted Claude Monet’s description of him as a ’virtuoso of light’.

La Hora del Baño is one of nine works by Sorolla to be offered in the sale. Taken together, they provide a vivid overview of the subtle changes in style and the consistent virtuosity that made Sorolla, in his day, as sought-after and revered as the greatest of his contemporaries - John Singer Sargent, Claude Monet and Anders Zorn among them.

Painted in 1899, Niña Comiendo Manzanas (Young Girl Eating Apples, est: £350,000-£450,000) comes from a period of intense happiness and activity for Sorolla. Newly-wed and enjoying an early taste of success, he threw himself into his work, celebrating the beauties of his native land and its people with an intensity of feeling that is clearly evident in this charming study of a young local girl in a garden. In 1911, Sorolla and his wife Clotilde moved to Madrid and it was there, in the garden of their lavish home at Paseo del General Martínez Campos, that Sorolla painted Jardín del la Casa Sorolla (est: £150,000-£200,000).

Other works by Sorolla include two striking portraits (Laura de San Telmo, Bailando, est: £180,000-£250,000, and Viejo Valenciano, est: £30,000-£50,000), both of which fully express Sorolla’s robust attitude to portraiture: "I don’t care how long you are preparing, how much pains you take to study your sitter. But when you get to work you should practically finish in a single sitting, because otherwise your sitter gets tired... and you get tired too." (Quoted by Carmen Gracia, the Painter Joaquín Sorolla, exh. Cat, London, 1989, p.97)

The bravura of Sorolla’s style and his love of Valencian life is perpetuated in the works of the Sorollistas, many of whom - including José Mongrell and Enrique Martínez Cubells - are also represented in the sale.

The region of Barcelona is equally richly represented. One of Barcelona’s most celebrated artists, Hermenegildo Anglada-Camarasa had, like Sorolla, a huge international reputation during his life-time. He exhibited widely in the United States and it is from there, property of the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, that one of his most iconic images comes to auction. Painted between 1911 and 1916, La Gata Rosa (The Pink Puss, est: £150,000-£200,000) fully demonstrates Anglada’s fascination with colour and pattern - a fascination that sprang in part from his appreciation for the Spanish landscape, particularly Majorca, and - albeit less obviously - from his love of firework displays and the iridescent patterns they describe against the night sky.

Other Catalan artists featured in the sale include Ramón Casas, Santiago Rusiñol, Isidoro Nonell, and Eliseo Meifrén, all of whom formed part of a group of avant-garde artists and intellectuals centred around the café Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona. A hotbed of ideas, the group was at the forefront of all that was new and exciting in Spanish art of the period. Picasso was a member, and the works of his early "blue" period deeply reflect the influence of his companion Isidoro Nonell, whose representations of society’s outcasts define much of the output of the group. Painted circa 1900, Nonell’s Playa de Pekin, Barcelona depicts a group of mendicant women on Barcelona’s Pekin Beach. A rare example of the artist’s early work in oil, this moving work is estimated at £60,000-£80,000.

One of the founding members of Els Quatre Gats, Ramón Casas was also a leading representative of the Modernista movement. Two of his works - Desnudo Femnino (Nude, est: £120,000-£180,000) and Mujer Con Boa (Woman with Boa, est: £90,000-£120,000) - fully demonstrate the "modernist" restraint, minimalist composition and reduced palette that spring from his admiration of Whistler and Degas.

The charismatic leader of Catalan modernism, Santiago Rusiñol travelled widely. In spite of his position as a leading member of the international avant-garde, however, it was in Spain that he was able to explore the full range of his resonant palette and where some of his most powerful works were completed. Estimated at £120,000-£180,000, Una Vista del Río Júcar, Cuenca reflects Rusiñol’s continued fascination with the dramatic scenery of Cuenca and its environs.

Just as Sorolla was deeply tied to the traditions of Valencia, so too Ignacio Zuloaga felt himself compelled to represent the people of Segovia, the centre of Spain’s Castilan heartland. Painted in 1904, La Calle de las Pasiones (est: £400,000-£600,000) epitomises the ideals of the Generacion del 98, a group of writers and artists who sought to encourage the patriotic regeneration of their country’s culture in the wake of Spain’s loss of her colonial empire at the end of the Spanish American War in 1898.

While Zuloaga considered himself heir to Goya and the great Castilan painters of the past, so too the aptly-named Madrid artist Eugenio Lucas Velázquez sought to continue the traditions of Spain’s aritistic past. He spent considerable time copying the works of Velázquez and Goya, and he assimilated their styles so completely that his own work is often barely distinguishable from that of the past masters. Estimated at £70,000-£90,000, Lucas’ Maja Dormida was until recently attributed to Goya - an attribution apparently borne out by the presence of a convincing (but later) inscription of the artist’s name on the canvas.

Equally aware of the artistic and cultural traditions of the past, Cordoban artist Julio Romero de Torres was far less reverential in attitude. While the composition of Romero’s La Consegración de la Copla (est: £450,000-£550,000) relates directly to that of an earlier work - La Virgen de los Plateros by Cordoban artist Juan de Valdes - Romero subverts the religious iconography of the past, replacing de Valdes’ virgin with a gypsy, and using local (often infamous) characters as models for the other figures. Family friends, a local prostitute and a well-known flamenco dancer all feature in the work, as too - in true Renaissance tradition - does the artist himself, tilting his hat at the viewer, whilst drawing on his cigarette.

Local religious ceremony recurs again in Fiesta de Santa Filomena, Buño (est: £50,000-£70,000) by Galician artist Fernando Alvarez de Sotomayor. Less irreverent than the work of Romero, Sotomayor’s panoptic view of the interior of the church in Buño depicts a sea of local faces in a powerful celebration of the strength of local people, their traditions and beliefs.

An exhibition - sponsored by UBS Bank - of these and other highlights will be held at the Ritz Hotel in Madrid from November 4 to November 6, 2003. In London, pre-sale viewing at Sotheby’s, New Bond Street, begins on Thursday, November 13 prior to the auction itself on Tuesday, November 18, 2003.