Portrait of an Unknown Gentleman

By 1600 the painter had lived in Toledo for nearly 20 years, a Greek from Crete who had passed through Venice and Rome before settling for good in the Spanish town where his strange, elongated style finally found its buyers. His name was Doménikos Theotokópoulos. Spaniards simply called him El Greco, the Greek. We no longer know who this gentleman was, only that he was almost certainly a Toledan, dressed in the sober black with a plain white collar the Spanish taste favoured. El Greco built the face from thin washes and sudden thick strokes of light, so the man seems to lean out of the dark toward you. He signed his portraits, as he signed most things, in Greek letters.