A most eccentric master

In 1895 the Spanish art collector John Charles Robinson donated a picture to the National Gallery. ‘On the whole I think it is very much above the average of this most eccentric master’s work,’ he phrased his offer less than enticingly. ‘At the same time you know the man was mad as a hatter and his work must be taken with “all faults” of which there are plenty.’

The man was Domenikos Theotokopoulos, aka El Greco, and the picture was ‘Christ Driving the Traders from the Temple’. To an English late 19th-century audience weaned on Murillo this ‘most eccentric master’ — a Cretan-born Byzantine icon painter turned Venetian colourist turned Spanish Mannerist — looked dangerously outré. But to a new wave of artists in continental Europe the master’s faults had started to look like virtues. In France, Cézanne paid him the compliment of updating his ‘Lady in a Fur Wrap’ as a ‘Femme au Boa’, and Picasso enlisted the nudes in his ‘Vision of Saint John’ as models for ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’.