San Giacomo pellegrino

By the 1590s El Greco had been in Toledo for some 20 years and was running a busy workshop, turning out sets of Christ and the twelve apostles for churches and private chapels. Saint James mattered more than the rest of them in Spain. He is the country's patron, and the road to his shrine at Compostela in the far north-west had been carrying walkers across Europe for 400 years, so he travels here, staff in hand, in a pilgrim's cloak, with a city and trees spread out below the hill he stands on. This is the earliest of the versions El Greco made of the figure, on a narrow canvas 62 centimetres high. It ended up in New York, at the Hispanic Society of America, founded in 1904 by Archer Huntington to hold the art of Spain and Portugal, where it carries the number A71.