Barrès before Toledo

By 1913 Maurice Barrès, the French novelist and nationalist politician, had become a passionate champion of El Greco, the Cretan-born painter who worked in Toledo in the late 16th century and had long been out of fashion. Barrès's essay on him, Greco, or the Secret of Toledo, came out as a book in 1911. Zuloaga, a Basque painter based in Paris, shared the passion and collected the old master's canvases himself. Here he paints the writer life-size on the rocks outside the city, in a black suit, holding his hat and gloves in one hand and a small book in the other. Behind him the town rises above the river, and a tiny horseman in red on a white horse rides toward the stone bridge. The collector Carlos de Beistegui gave the portrait to the French national museums in 1936.