NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE I’ ve written on and off about the Hispanic Society in New York. It has the best collection of Spanish art, manuscripts, and rare books outside Spain, with marquee paintings by superstars such as Goya, Velázquez, and El Greco, displayed in a Beaux Arts pile in galleries built to evoke an old Spanish palace court.

The Hispanic Society is grand, stirring, romantic, magical, and all-around fantastic.

I visited on Wednesday, and I was a man on a mission. A Sorolla mission. Among the Hispanic Society’s many stunners is its Vision of Spain gallery displaying a 225-foot-long series of paintings by Joaquín Sorolla (1863–1923) commissioned in the Teens for exactly this spot. In 14 paintings, some as tall as 15 feet, Sorolla depicts the people, costumes, landscapes, and traditions of Spain’s distinct regions from Andalusia to Valencia, Galicia, Extremadura, Catalunya, and Castile. It’s one of the most electrifying art spaces in America.

It’s the 100th anniversary of Sorolla’s death. I’ve written twice about Picasso’s 50th-death-anniversary shows. He’s either with the gods in Parnassus or fried crispy with Hades. For the Sorolla anniversary, I wanted to see his triumphant series. Vision of Spain is his opus as well as the thing that killed him from exertion. Sorolla painted Spanish kings, celebrities in the arts, rich Madrileños, and, further afield, William Howard Taft. His home and studio in central Madrid are, together, a showplace.

I hadn’t seen Vision of Spain in a couple of years. The Hispanic Society is tackling decades of very, very deferred maintenance, so the Sorolla gallery has been closed. It’s open now. The Hispanic Society’s free. Uber goes there. The 1 and C trains stop a block away. It’s on Broadway, not the Broadway of song, dance, and fractured families but Broadway and 155th Street. There, the song, dance, and fractured families are Dominican. Go there. You’ll live, and it’s certainly less risky than scheduling a visit to the Titanic. Seeing Vision of Spain is a unique, unforgettable experience.

Sorolla’s sometimes called Spain’s version of John Singer Sargent, for his bold application of paint, vivid color, and sparkle. Like Sargent, he was an eminent portraitist. Sargent loved Spanish light and music and visited Spain often. Yes, they’re on parallel, sometimes overlapping tracks, but Sorolla is his own thing. His work’s muscular, with the look and feel of a bacchanal. He makes Sargent look chaste.

The paintings, all 225 feet of them, were cleaned and conserved a few years ago. What’s changed is the addition of proper HVAC. The floor-dwelling monolith dehumidifier is gone. All the finishes, floors, walls, lighting, and ceiling are restored and refreshed.

The gallery’s a literal and figural tour of Spain. It’s literal in depicting scenes that define and distinguish each of 14 regions. It’s literal, too, in that the paintings are oriented in the space like a map of both Spain and Manhattan, more or less. Castilla y León gets the biggest picture. It’s in northern Spain, more north-central, and Sorolla’s scene is on the Hispanic Society’s north wall. It’s the bold thing we first see, and it depicts a bread festival. We know it’s Castilla y León from the walls of Avila in the background, though Avila and the bread festival merge into Toledo, with a throng of men, women, horses, and wagons transporting sacks of flour.

It’s quite a production, and there’s nothing like it in Spanish art, at least in Sorolla’s time. Sorolla painted Vision of Spain in the Teens, long before Technicolor and CinemaScope, but movies had arrived. The look is cinematic, and Sorolla might well have anticipated the new medium’s potential. At the center, and the center of Vision of Spain, is a man tapping his drum. Women to his right — our left — carry platters of artisanal bread, dressed in local costumes. The women form a procession. Children to the right of the drummer are less organized. Figures are larger than life.

Archer Huntington (1870–1955), the founder of the Hispanic Society, wanted scenes of Spain that were aesthetically dynamic but also anthropological. He saw the Society as a preservationist, not only of the art, books, and documents he collected but of the look and traditions of Spain’s regions. Displaying Sorolla’s work was only one purpose assigned to this gallery. Housed in cases beneath the paintings was Huntington’s collection of photographs of everyday life throughout Spain. Visitors could study the photographs and revel in Sorolla’s lush, vibrant paintings.

Heading east, Sorolla depicts scenes from Navarre, Aragon, Catalunya, and Valencia. Officials march in processions, women dance, and men fish. Sorolla painted lots of subjects and in many genres over his career. He’s probably best known for blue oceans, blue skies, and beach scenes. The Tuna Catch, set in the town of Ayamonte, in Andalusia, is dazzling. Andalusia in southern Spain dominates the south wall with a cattle drive. As cities go, Seville gets the place of honor, with three pictures, one of flamenco dancers, another of penitents dressed in black, and a third of bullfighters. Circling back to Castilla y León’s scene are The Tuna Catch, a cattle fair in Galicia, and a skittles game in Basque Country.

Sorolla was more than a little inspired by Francisco Goya’s painted tapestry designs from the 1770s into the 1780s. Charles III commissioned Goya, then a young man, to design tapestries for two royal palaces, showing scenes of everyday life, partly from Spain’s regions and their costumes but mostly Spain’s types from Spanish novels and songs. Bandits, hawkers, dancers, boys making mischief, and, yes, a prostitute or two appear. Goya’s paintings went to tapestry makers to be woven and shown on palace walls. In Sorolla’s time, the paintings, or cartoons, hung at the Prado.

Sorolla was born in Valencia but spent most of his life as a high-establishment culture star in Madrid. Both he and Huntington craved authenticity. Huntington especially wanted Sorolla to record the look and heritage of old, rural Spain before modernity and industry swallowed it. Sorolla, a creature of Madrid, might not have been best suited for the task. He painted the pictures both en plein air and in his studio. He made hundreds of oil sketches and drawings. What he saw and prioritized were, here and there, akin to what a successful Manhattan artist would view as authentic if he went on a painting trip to Mississippi or Iowa.

Still, no matter. The series is dazzling. Huntington got what he wanted. He and Sorolla sought Spain’s diversity. Spain’s regions are very different, with different historical and cultural trajectories. The country wasn’t united until 1492, and over the years we’ve seen that Catalunya and the Basque Country aren’t entirely Spanish. Huntington was a scholar. He understood that, much as Spain’s regions were different, so were America’s.

Vision of Spain was restored in the early 2010s as the Hispanic Society planned to send the entire series on a tour through Spain. More than 2 million people saw them. While they were gone, the museum mounted a treasures show touring the U.S. and also began to tackle its infrastructure problems. Every system in its massive campus needed to be replaced. Its buildings had no HVAC. The last time I saw Vision of Spain, the gallery’s HVAC system — the size of a small tank — sat on the floor. Now it lives behind the walls. The Society’s great collection of Old Master paintings returns this fall. Its traditional two-story, balconied, and terra-cotta-rich galleries have been restored and climatized.

All of this took and will continue to take big bucks. I’ve written this before, and a good point always bears repeating, but I can’t fathom why smart, rich people in Manhattan give millions to the Met or MoMA when the Hispanic Society is just as venerable and worthy and far more needy. Prestige and vanity rear their ugly heads and toss their curls, I know, but a seven- or eight-figure gift to this great museum would be the transformative, good, and right thing to do.

The Hispanic Society’s small staff unionized three or four years ago and just finished an eight-week strike. I can’t say I blame them. Most have worked there for decades in a labor of love. These aren’t stupid, transient young people but committed, experienced scholars and professionals who saw no option since the museum leadership squeezed their benefits and took advantage of their longevity to keep wages below industry standards. The strike’s over. Labor, and that includes curators and librarians, seems happy.

Philippe de Montebello, whom I admire, chairs the Hispanic Society board. He was quite a catch a few years ago, joining the board after retiring from his 30-year reign as director of the Met.

There’s a lovely, surprising temporary exhibition in the Vision of Spain gallery, in cases beneath the paintings. I didn’t mind, since the art’s so good and it resonates with the Sorollas. It’s jewelry designed by Luz Camino. Camino is 78 and for 50 years has been making flower and fruit jewelry in rich, dazzling colors much like the ones Sorolla used. Her materials aren’t only diamonds and pearls but crystallized bismuth, barite, white resin, vanadinite, and amethyst, for starters. She’s Madrid-based. Jewelry’s art, and I write about it whenever I see the best.

Vision of Spain is immersive, visually rather than through technology. Unlike almost every other museum in New York, the Hispanic Society is FREE, by Huntington’s decree and the laws of righteousness. My one quibble, aside from the suggestion that 86-year-old Philippe de Montebello retire, is that the Society last year mounted Latinx Diaspora: Stories from Upper Manhattan. I didn’t see the show, but “Latinx” is a phony, gringo term no one with a drop of Latin American blood likes.

Through coincidence as well as kismet, this is my fourth story in the last month or so on Spanish art. Enough, though I love writing about Spanish art. I’ve got some new, juicy topics. I’ll write about the Fogg’s exhibition of American watercolors and, for the 4th of July or thereabouts, Augustus St. Gaudens’s home and sculpture park. The St. Gaudens historic site in Cornish, N.H., is America’s smallest national park.

Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum owns watercolors to die for, and they’re very rarely shown. I hadn’t been there in a while. I was in Boston this week and read that the morgue director at Harvard’s medical school was arrested for selling body parts, for his own, not Harvard’s, enrichment. Each and every Yalie, I can assure you, finds this tasteless in the extreme. With my own body parts intact in a living frame, and I doubt ever marketable, I remembered that the Fogg is one of the country’s great museums and took the risk. I had a great visit.

At the end of this week, I leave for a road trip. I’ll be covering art stories in Lancaster, Pa., Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Cleveland, and Toledo.