Bildnis einer Dame

This small portrait of a woman comes as one of a pair, a lady and a gentleman, and it has spent more than a century inside an argument over who made it. It carries El Greco's name and even a signature, which is part of why the doubt runs so deep. Around 1900 the taste for El Greco ran so hot that the market filled with genuine works, copies and outright fakes alike, and later scholars grew cautious. In 1962 Harold Wethey, who compiled the standard catalogue of the artist, rejected the attribution of these two little portraits outright. Others, pointing to their quality, have kept them as real. Its companion, the unnamed gentleman, hangs beside it at the Hispanic Society in New York.