Saint François d'Assise et frère Léon méditant sur la mort

Saint Francis kneels with a skull in his hands, meditating on death, while his companion Brother Leo prays in the shadows at the lower left. It's a Spanish devotional image from the last years of El Greco, the Greek-born painter who spent his career in Toledo, and it comes from his workshop, which turned out this composition again and again; versions of it hang in the Prado, in Toledo, in Milan and beyond. What's odd is where this particular canvas ended up. Before it entered a French public collection it belonged to Théodore Duret, the critic who defended Manet and the Impressionists when almost no one else would. El Greco was being rediscovered around 1900 by exactly that Parisian circle, and Duret was among the collectors who bought back this stern old Spaniard. The picture now hangs in Castres, in a museum given over entirely to Spanish art.