Adoration of the Shepherds

Around 1569 the man we call El Greco was still a young Cretan painter working in Italy, decades before Toledo and the elongated saints that made his name. He signed himself Domenikos Theotokopoulos and was busy absorbing Venice, especially the way Titian and others lit a night scene from within. This Adoration of the Shepherds comes from those early years, a subject he would return to again and again across his life. How it ended up in a small Danish town is its own story. The painter Jens Ferdinand Willumsen spent decades studying El Greco, published a two-volume book on him in 1927, and helped turn him into an obsession for artists across Scandinavia. This early panel now hangs in the museum that carries Willumsen's own name, in Frederikssund.