Andrés Hurtado didn't go to Seville in search of art. He was there for a few days' sightseeing and on Saturday, at around 4.30 p.m., in the kind of relentless heat that brooks no mercy, he came across something left lying on the pavement that caught his eye for the least artistic of reasons: the frame.
'I saw some lads dumping a painting in the street.' And he thought: 'What a cool frame.' 'To be honest, I didn't pay any attention to the painting itself, I just took it up to the hotel with me,' he told the local press. He walked off with it, quite literally, in a shopping bag he'd just bought in an Asian bazaar, unaware that he had just salvaged an original Sorolla that its owners had forgotten in the middle of a lightning-fast move to their beach house.
From suspicion to artificial intelligence
Doubts crept in almost straight away. 'With so many replicas and fakes around, I never imagined it could be an original Sorolla,' admitted Hurtado, a former supermarket worker who is currently unemployed. So he did what everyone does in 2026 when they have an existential doubt about a canvas: he asked artificial intelligence. The reply opened up the possibility that the work might be genuine: 'It told me it could well be so.'
