El Greco was born in Crete, trained in Venice and Rome, and settled in Toledo in 1577, where he lived for the rest of his life. Around 1599 to 1600 he painted the city that had become his home, and the result looks like no other landscape of its time.
The sky is a mass of dark, torn clouds, with bright patches breaking through. The city sits on its hill in a cold light, pale buildings against a black-green ground, with the cathedral spire and the old palace on the skyline. In the foreground the hills are a bright, almost acid green, as if the storm had washed the colors.
It is not a map. El Greco moved landmarks around to improve the composition, and the real positions of buildings are not what he shows. The picture is about the feeling of a city under a threatening sky more than its geography.
Landscape painting was rare in Spain, and this is one of only two surviving landscapes by the artist. The other, View and Plan of Toledo, is in the museum that bears his name in the city itself. This painting came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1929 with the Havemeyer bequest, and has been among its most admired works since.
El Greco's View of Toledo appears on our: