The Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Hyacinth

El Greco painted this late, around 1605, when he was an old man running a busy workshop in Toledo. By then his style had gone fully its own way: figures stretched tall, colours cool and acid, everything lit as if from inside. The saint is Hyacinth, a Polish Dominican friar of the 13th century, shown at the moment the Virgin and Child appear to him. It was a fitting subject for Counter-Reformation Spain, which wanted images that made you feel a vision rather than merely read it. A second, larger version of the same scene exists, now in Philadelphia. The Rochester picture passed through the collection of the painter Henri Rouart in Paris before crossing the Atlantic.