O Nascimento da Virgem

This comes from the very end of El Greco's life in Toledo, somewhere between 1608 and his death in 1614, when he was in his seventies and his style had pushed about as far as it would go. The figures are stretched and flickering, lit by a cold, unreal light that seems to fall from no fixed source, the colours flaring and fading like flame. The scene itself is ordinary enough, the newborn Virgin being tended by the women of the household, but nothing in the handling is ordinary. Paintings this loose and strange found few admirers for a long time. It was only around 1900, when younger painters were pulling their own art apart, that El Greco's late work was rediscovered and taken seriously.