While the wife stands straight, aligned to the edge, the daughter Maria has slightly turned her head to her right shoulder and is looking towards the viewer.

In her right hand Maria holds a yellow straw hat with a wide, sweeping brim, decorated with purple colored flowers and a turquoise bow.

Clothilde's dress has cropped sleeves, and she carries a jacket, also made of white fabric, on her left forearm in front of her abdomen.

A greenish-transparent veil is draped over the entire hat, and falls forward over her face and is blown backward almost horizontally in the wind.

The clothes and accessories show the two women to be members of the upper class spending their free time in the summer with mild temperatures and light winds.

Instead, the beach and the sea form a curtain-like background and a curl of white foam rides a wave at the top of the screen, replacing the horizon.

Playback of these lighting effects under the southern sun are typical Valenciano for Luminismo, one in Spain resulting from the Impressionism as a special form of Neo-Impressionism, whose main representative was Joaquín Sorolla.

He had already been widely recognized for his paintings and received awards not only in Spain but also in France and Germany, but the year 1909 was a high point in his career.

At the invitation of the American art collector Archer M. Huntington, he traveled with his wife and the two older children Maria and Joaquín at the beginning of the year to New York City.

Here Huntington had previously opened the Hispanic Society of America that year and in their rooms, should Sorolla showed the first exhibition of his work in the United States.

[11] During his stay in the United States Sorolla received 20 portrait commissions, including that of the just-elected US President William Howard Taft, whom he visited in the White House in Washington, D.C.[12] In May 1909, as Sorolla left the United States, he had sold a total of 195 images - including two works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art - and taken in the enormous sum of 181,760 US dollars.

Inspired by the success of his trip to America and the good reviews he received at the exhibitions in Paris and Valencia, he began a prolific summer.

He stayed until the end of September in Valencia and created in these summer months "some of his best and most spectacular beach scenes," as his biographer and granddaughter Blanca Pons-Sorolla notes.

[15] The resulting paintings of this summer beach walk provide a climax in Sorolla's career according to José Luis Alcaide.

In his early work, there is the traditional port view Marina, Barcos en el Puerto with which he made his debut in the art exhibition Expsoición National in Madrid in 1881.

In the foreground one of the children comes from the sea and is awaited by a young woman who stretches out a white cloth to dry the wet child.

So the white fabric plays a central role: The movement of the cloth in the wind is already the main subject, the shore area between the water and beach has no clear contours and the whole picture is bathed in the light of early evening.

In the portrait Elena en la playa Sorolla portrayed his youngest daughter in a white dress with the beach as a background.

The son Joaquín Sorolla García, followed the generous example of his mother and after his death in 1948 bequeathed to the Spanish government the Walk on the Beach painting, along with other works of his father.