Disrobing of Christ (by J.M.Theotocópuli)

El Greco painted the Disrobing of Christ for the sacristy of Toledo cathedral between 1577 and 1579, and the composition went on being repeated for decades afterwards. Harold Wethey, working through them, listed 15 paintings of the subject plus a group of four half-length versions, and judged that five had El Greco's own hand in them.

This one is smaller and weaker than the cathedral canvas, and it counts for a different reason. Low on the right, painted onto a little slip of paper, is the name Je Manuel Theotocopuly. It is the only signed work by El Greco's son, which makes it the one fixed point in a body of pictures otherwise held together by attributions nobody has been able to prove. He painted it around 1606, while his father was still alive and still running the workshop in Toledo.

The museum's reading is that he was not working from the cathedral picture at all. A crown of thorns sits above Christ's head here, and an old man with a grey beard has been added at the back on the right, both of them details that belong to other versions of the composition. The canvas is in Toledo today, on deposit from the Prado at the Museo del Greco, a short walk from the sacristy where his father's original still hangs.