Annunciation

By around 1590 the painter known as El Greco, the Greek, had settled in Toledo in Spain, far from his native Crete and his years in Venice and Rome. He painted the Annunciation, the angel Gabriel telling Mary she will bear Christ, many times, and always in his own strange key, with figures stretched tall and thin under a cold, flickering light that looks lit from within rather than from the sun. This version left Europe in the 1920s, when a Japanese painter, Torajiro Kojima, spotted it for sale in France and urged his patron to buy it. It hangs today in Kurashiki, one of only two El Greco paintings in all of Japan.