View of Toledo

El Greco lived most of his life in Toledo, and this is the city he saw, painted around 1600 under a sky that has gone almost black with storm while the hills below glow a strange electric green. It is one of only two surviving landscapes he ever made, which is part of why it feels so unlike the religious commissions that filled his days. It is also not quite Toledo. He rearranged the place to suit the picture, shifting the cathedral to the wrong side of the city and tightening the buildings on their hill, so it reads less as a record than as the town remembered under pressure. There are no people in it and almost no incident, just the walls, the river below and that extraordinary sky, which later got grouped with Van Gogh's Starry Night among the most famous skies in Western painting.