It is little wonder that Hollywood turned its lenses onto the turbulent melodrama of Frida Kahlo’s life.

Had she been the invention of a screenwriter, a film studio would have considered it too overwrought a tale for the audience to suspend disbelief.

But as she herself once explained: ‘They thought I was a

Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.’

The Two Fridas was completed shortly after her divorce from the acclaimed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. He passionately encouraged her to paint autobiographically, with works inspired by events in her life.

Diego was convinced that ‘she is the first woman in the history of art to treat, with absolute and uncompromising honesty, one might even say with impassive cruelty, those general and specific themes which exclusively affect women.’

In the double self-portrait she depicts herself with two entirely different personalities – but even with two of her, her own loneliness is still reflected.

Frida on the right-hand side is sitting in a traditional

Mexican Tehuana costume and represents the woman Diego loved so deeply.

She sits holding a small, framed picture of Diego as a young boy. Diego, the now ex-husband, appears to be absent, as if a childhood memory.

Her heart is exposed but appears intact and healthy.

It was not unusual for Frida to adopt a maternal role towards Diego and in other paintings she suggested that women in general like to mother their men, and ‘amongst them, I always want most of all, to hold a man in my arms like a new born baby.’

However, she questions this idea of possession in her diary:

‘Why do I call him My Diego? He never was nor ever will he be mine. He belongs to himself.’

Frida’s life ( 1907-1954) and her art had been shadowed by an accident that occurred in 1925, when a bus she was riding crashed into a tram. Passengers on both were killed and others suffered horrific injuries; an iron rod pierced through Kahlo’s stomach and uterus.

It took her many weeks in hospital and months in a cast to walk again, and for the rest of her life she would suffer relapses.

It also resulted in her being unable to have children with

Diego after being burdened with three miscarriages. Anatomy became a key theme in her painting, redolent of her trauma and ill health.

The Frida on the left-hand side is dressed in a colonial-style wedding dress. The white purity of the dress is stained with blood. Her dress is ripped and a slight undulation of her breast is exposed only to reveal her broken heart. A severed artery bleeds onto her lap. Her death seems imminent and is brought to the forefront of the painting.

The large flowing skirt depicted in this painting, ornately decorated with floral patterns is symbolic of her Mexican origins.

Underneath the skirt lies another secret. At the age of six the artist contracted polio and the disease stunted the growth in her right leg. Frida used these skirts to hide her bodily defect.

In an impassioned letter sent to Rivera, she wrote: ‘Only one mountain can know the core of another mountain.’ It demonstrated her belief that only they could understand each other intimately, and that unlike most couples, they were both equally strong and powerful.

When the couple were first together Diego was forty-two,

6’1’ tall and weighed three hundred pounds, overpoweringly larger than Frida who was twenty-two years old, 5’3’ tall and weighed a mere ninety-eight pounds.

Kahlo’s mother described their union as ‘…the marriage between an elephant and a dove’ and did not appear at the wedding ceremony because of her disapproval. Her father was the only person to attend the wedding.

Although Frida later attempted to improve their relationship, her mother considered her too rebellious, too strong willed, too unlady like. She called her ‘El Jefe’ (The Boss) and would remain detached from her throughout her life.

In 1933 the couple had a house designed consisting of two separate concrete blocks united by a narrow bridge, which connected the two rooftops. The red block represented Diego and the blue Frida.

Although passionate lovers, their relationship was far from smooth; they both had several affairs and infidelity was the cause of suffering and pain for each of them.

Frida was bisexual and is known to have slept with Leon

Trotsky and Josephine Baker, a prominent French dancer, singer and actress. Although Diego appeared unscathed by

Frida’s relationships with women, he became fiercely jealous of other men.

In later years Frida became estranged from Rivera and they divorced in 1939, only to remarry a year later in 1940.

Sadly, their second marriage was no happier than the first.

Frida was devastated after she discovered the truth about

Diego’s affair with Cristina, her younger sister. She could not draw or paint for a year.

When she finally began painting again, her first work was entitled A Few Little Pricks.

It depicted a newspaper report of a woman violently stabbed to death twenty times by her husband in the middle of the night. Apparently he had suspected that she had cheated on him, and in a frenzied act of jealousy he killed her.

Frida painted about two hundred paintings, half of which are self-portraits. After her divorce from Diego nearly all of her paintings depicted herself – alone.

Through all of her adversity she was formidable and resilient; bedridden for a large part of her life, she regularly painted in a corset, whilst lying on her back.

She would paint herself from a mirror attached to the canopy of her bed. ‘I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.’

She even had a skeleton attached to the canopy of her bed to remind her of her own mortality.

Although today she is recognised as one of the world’s greatest ever painters, in her lifetime Frida Kahlo only ever had one show in the United States. It took place in a gallery specialising in Surrealism, and more than half of her art remained unsold.

The Two Fridas was bought in 1947 by the National

Institute of Fine Arts in Mexico City.

Kahlo received 4,000 Pesos for the picture and 36 Pesos for the frame, the equivalent of $1,000. This was the largest sum she would ever earn from one of her paintings.

When Van Gogh (1853-1890) hospitalised himself at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, an asylum and clinic for the mentally ill, he was allocated a studio and was also allowed to paint in his bedroom.

This provided an extensive view of the mountain range of the Alpilles: it was here that Van Gogh painted Starry Night in June 1889.

Van Gogh saw the night as ‘even more coloured than the day’ and obsessively waited for the perfect night sky. Interestingly, Van Gogh had originally planned this work as a pendant piece

Paul Gauguin was in charge of organising an art exhibit for the 1890 World’s Fair shortly after Starry Night was completed, and Van Gogh wanted it to be displayed alongside its daylight companion, his Wheatfield with Cypress – a representation of the landscape of Starry Night at midday.

Even though the sun is not visibly included, the brightly painted and shadowless wheatfield suggest the overhead light of noon.

Van Gogh’s paintings weren’t included in the show in the end.

Van Gogh had been fascinated by Delacroix’s use of colour, especially of the two colours he described as ‘most condemned, and with most reason, citron-yellow and

Prussian blue.’

He felt Delacroix ‘did superb things with them’ – and inspired his palette for Starry Night. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has recently revealed that the hues originally painted by Van Gogh in the1880s have actually faded, and what we see today are pale echoes of the original colours.

Of course, it remains an electrifying painting, composed using elements of a few previously completed works still stored in Van Gogh’s studio.

He envisioned his ideal Starry Night over a landscape and not over a town. He wanted it to be not merely a descriptive piece of work, but an amalgamation of aspects from imagination and memory.

He depicted a cypress and a village rather than the enclosed field beneath his bedroom, and these are seen in the sketches he had previously drawn.

The bird’s eye view in the painting highlights the vastness of space and time. Harvard Professor Charles Whitney noticed a stylised but striking similarity between the painting and the swirling star configurations and scientific drawings of spiral nebulas that had been published and widely discussed in France in the late1880s.

He also found accurate portrayals of the Milky Way, Aquarius, crescent moons and other star patterns in a number of Van Gogh’s other paintings.

Van Gogh incorporated an important revision from the detailed ink study of the Starry Night to the final painting; to allow for the addition of an eleventh star, he reduced the cypress tree.

In his younger years, he wanted to dedicate his life to evangelising for those in poverty. This exact number of eleven stars was significant to Van Gogh’s powerful religious conviction; they held an important link for him to Genesis

37:9, and a favourite phrase he often referred to: ‘I had another dream, and this time the sun and moon and eleven stars were bowing down to me.’

In 1890 Van Gogh moved to Auvers to be near his physician Dr Paul Gachet, who lived there and had agreed to look after Vincent.

When he had first met Gachet, he was initially impressed, but soon became doubtful of his competence and commented that Gachet was ‘sicker than I am, I think, or shall we say just as much.’

However, he and the doctor became great friends, and Van

Gogh was drawn to his obsessive passions for homeopathy, electroshock therapy, and anthropology.

He painted numerous portraits of Gachet, one of which sold at auction in 1990 for over $80 million, a world record at the time.

(Vincent only ever sold one painting in his lifetime, the wonderful Red Vineyard, to a wealthy artist friend for 400 Francs, about £750 today. The picture is now owned by the Pushkin Museum, in Moscow.)

He regularly told his brother and sister that he found Gachet’s mental instability similar to his own, and identified with Gachet’s avid involvement in his work as his way of easing loneliness and melancholy.

He also praised the doctor for having ‘good knowledge of what is being done these days among the painters’, and liked the fact that Gachet himself drew and made engravings to help him maintain his balance.

He also added, ‘Unfortunately it is expensive here in the village, but Gachet tells me that I can pay him in pictures, and I could not do that with anyone else if anything happened and I needed help.’

The same day he wrote to his brother Theo mentioning that although Gachet seemed very sensible, he was ‘as discouraged about his job as a country doctor as I am about my painting’ and that Van Gogh offered to ‘gladly exchange job for job. If the depression or anything else became too great for me to bear, he could quite well do something to diminish its intensity, and that I must not find it awkward to be frank with him. Well, the moment when I shall need him may certainly come, however up to now all is well.’

It is still unknown why Van Gogh did eventually decide to commit suicide, at just thirty-seven.

Gachet proposed to give a eulogy at the funeral, but struggled as he wept profusely and eventually stammered a very confused farewell. He was attempting to outline Vincent’s achievements, praise the honesty of his work, and point out that the fact that he prized art above everything, and that would make his name live.

It was Dr. Gachet who had summoned Theo after Van

Gogh had shot himself. The doctor had striven hard to save Vincent’s life but his efforts were eventually in vain.

Shortly after Van Gogh’s death, Gachet wrote to Theo: ‘The more I think of it, the more I think Vincent was a giant. Not a day passes that I do not look at his pictures.’

Van Gogh joins the ranks of many artists whose lives have been made into biopics by various Hollywood studios, including Michelangelo, Vermeer, Gauguin, Turner, Basquiat,

Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Pollock, Modigliani, Goya,

Caravaggio, Gentileschi, Renoir, Munch, Rembrandt,

Warhol, O’Keeffe, Klimt, da Vinci, Rockwell, El Greco,

Bacon, Kahlo, and Matisse.

Van Gogh is alone in having three films devoted to his life, in which he is played by Kirk Douglas, Tim Roth and Jacques Dutronc.

Diego Velázquez’s (1599-1660) Las Meninas is one of the most puzzled over works in the

Western canon of art history.

It is a universe on a canvas, a vertiginous and dizzying display of artistic bravura that leaves many questions hanging in the courtly air it evokes, its enigmas perplexing generations of viewers.

Its enormous scale helps defeat the boundaries between reality and fantasy, artwork and real space.

You feel almost able to step into this strange multi-layered scene, to become part of the court of King Felipe IV. Indeed, on closer inspection, you sense that you are actually standing in the place of the king and queen, who are dimly reflected in the mirror at the back of the room.

The pair are supposedly the subject of Velázquez’s metapainting being made in front of our very eyes, in a neat piece of conceptual play.

The court of Felipe was a place of strict hierarchy and monarchic power in a Golden Age of art and culture. Velázquez held a post at the centre of this world, succeeding to the role of court painter after the death of Rodrigo de Villandrando.

Velázquez had arrived in Madrid in 1622 with letters of introduction to the King’s chaplain, and when he managed to get a commission to create a royal portrait, he completed it in one day.

It was enough to have him appointed court painter. His succession was made on the basis that no other painter would ever paint the king, and that all other portraits would be withdrawn from circulation – as canny a piece of brand management as today’s marketing manipulations.

In this schema the king sat at a godly distance above the rest of society, his power an expression of divine right and superiority.

Next came courtiers, the nobility, and religious leaders, followed by the leading artisans, of which Velázquez was one, and then the working populace, placed above the lowly peasants, the disfigured, the lame, and finally animals.

Looking at the painting one can see that Velázquez has included all parts of this organising principle, from the monarchs, to children, dwarves, maids, and a dog.

However he has visually upended the courtly hierarchy: we the viewer become the monarch, he the artisan becomes the divine creator, and it is the dwarf whose eyes are cast directly to the king and queen.

This dexterous unseating comes directly from Velázquez’s readings of the humanist literature that had become so popular in his day, particularly with Cervantes’s Don Quixote published fifty years earlier.

This humanism can be traced in other works – Velázquez painted several portraits of the dwarves that populated the court at the time, treating them empathetically and capturing their wit and intelligence.

Indeed, dwarves were a fundamental part of the court, particularly so under the reign of Felipe who was said to have at least one hundred and ten dwarf retainers.

They fulfilled a very real function: they could be petted, befriended and confided in without arousing the jealousies of the rest of the courtiers who surrounded the monarch, constantly engaged in intrigue and plots to curry favour.

Velázquez painted many of these: Diego de Acedo, or El Primo, rumoured to be a ladies’ man, and the bearer of the royal seal, Sebastian de Morra.

Each portrait is a searing psychological examination of its subject, treated with the same skill, intensity and flair as those made of the royal family.

The cool, detached approach that Velázquez always took enabled him to portray the court dwarves with the same impartial formality as the highest ranking members of the royal household.

The dwarves’ deformities are revealed through their awkward, unconventional poses, just as the noblest sitters, be it Pope Innocent X, or the monarch himself, are ‘treated with liberality and affability that is unbelievable,’ wrote his master, Pacheco.

This levelling of the playing field in Velázquez’s work made him an appealing humanist figure.

Had it not been for his court standing, it is unlikely that Velázquez would have been able to escape the censorship of the Inquisition.

At the time, his painting of Venus At The Mirror, the only surviving nude painted by the artist, would not have been permitted to be displayed.

In Las Meninas it is Maria Barbola, a female dwarf, who stares out to the unseen royal couple, as direct in her gaze as the painter himself.

Questions regarding this painting still abound. Who is the figure in the doorway framed by light? Has he just arrived with news for the royal couple?

Who painted the cross on Velázquez’s chest? He was not awarded this specific honour until years after the painting had been completed.

Is the picture of the king and queen at the back of the room a mirror, or another painting?

But perhaps the most vexing question Velázquez would have meditated upon is what is the function of painting itself?

Is it to be a mirror on the world, or to reveal some essential, yet coded, truth about society?

Perhaps more than any other artist, Velázquez has inspired many generations of painters.

The Realists and Impressionists including Goya and Manet, and the giants of the 20th century, Picasso, Dalí and Bacon, have paid homage to Velasquez by recreating several of his most celebrated works.

His electrifying effect can be measured by Picasso painting his own interpretations of Velázquez fifty-eight times, in his own Cubist style, during the 1950s.

Las Meninas itself is regarded by many artists as the pinnacle of artistic powers, our greatest masterpiece.

Yet for another hundred years Velázquez’s art was scarcely known outside Spain.

Raphael Mengs wrote at that time, ‘How this painter, greater than Raphael or Titian, truer far than Rubens or Van Dyke, should have been lost from view is more than I can comprehend. I cannot find words to describe the splendour of his art.’

John Ruskin, the foremost art critic writing in the 19^th century, stated: ‘Everything Velázquez does may be regarded as absolutely right.’

In 17th-century Amsterdam becoming a member of the civic guard, accepted as one of the prominent burghers of the city, meant great social and political prestige.

In order to be eligible for membership, you needed to show an annual income of at least six hundred guilders, and acknowledge that you were prohibited from swearing, or visiting taverns and brothels.

The chosen ones of Amsterdam decided to immortalise themselves in paint, and Rembrandt (1606- 1669) was commissioned to create a group portrait; he was paid a minimum of one hundred guilders by each of the eighteen members, under the command of Captain Frans Cocq.

Cocq and his lieutenant, Willem van Ruijtenburch, offered

Rembrandt a premium for being prominently positioned in the painting, and in fact the artist decided each gentleman’s placement based on the individual commission price they agreed to pay him.

This unseemly marriage of vanity and greed was to become one of Rembrandt’s greatest masterpieces, The Night Watch.

Rembrandt painted Captain Frans Cocq clothed in black, the dress code of the ruling classes of the city. Cocq, the son of a pharmacist had married well, and inherited large proportions of his elderly father-in-law’s properties.

His lieutenant van Ruijtenburch was lesser in rank than

Cocq and is painted smaller, although the rich yellow colour of his clothes suggests his wealth – he owned a palace in

Amsterdam and a large family estate.

The flag-bearer at the back of the painting is pictured as a striking and powerful figure, whose role was to appear resolute in all ceremonies and parades taking place at the time.

He was expected to remain a bachelor due to his venerable responsibility of carrying out flag duties.

Measuring thirteen by sixteen feet, Rembrandt painted

The Night Watch on a scaffold in the backyard of his home, as it was too large to lean against a wall in any of the rooms in the house.

Rembrandt had an avid interest in weapons and painted the men in The Night Watch carrying many different kinds.

He collected old uniforms, once-fashionable discarded clothes, and embroidered fabrics, from public auctions. He liked to hang these on the walls of his studio.

He was also deeply interested in old head-coverings, instruments, arrows, halberds, daggers, and sabres.

He referred to these as ‘antiques’ and searched for these items enthusiastically through the entire city, and on the market stalls on its bridges.

On his searches, he also noted people on the street whose appearance resembled historical characters.

His collecting habits are said to have greatly influenced the portrayals of characters in his paintings.

At the time, group portraits of important city leaders would decorate the assembly halls to celebrate the members’ significance, and also to promote a sense of importance for the town.

The burghers commissioned Rembrandt to paint them in traditional postures, but Rembrandt responded with an audacious composition that broke all traditional rules.

Rather than replicating the typical arrangement of rows of figures, a custom prevalent at the time, Rembrandt arranged his figures more dynamically.

However, on viewing the painting, everyone from the burghers themselves to the town’s herring-peddlers, thought the picture was dreadful.

The patrons demanded that changes be made, but

Rembrandt stubbornly refused, assuming that in due time he would be proven right.

Van Hoogstraten, a prominent former student of Rembrandt’s, praised the effort to achieve liveliness and unity in the work, but went on to criticise his master stating,

‘I would have preferred if he would have kindled more light into it.’

These remarks were one of the causes of Rembrandt’s fall from grace. The lack of light in the painting led to The Night

Watch being rejected, and Rembrandt’s further decline in popularity followed as other wealthy patrons started to prefer bright colours rather than Rembrandt’s dark portraits.

Rembrandt was a successful and wealthy painter by his late twenties. He married a pleasingly rich heiress, Saskia van

Uylenburgh, in 1634, which further improved his financial situation.

However, young Rembrandt was a spendthrift and his excessive purchases led to many disputes with his in-laws.

Always hungry for cash, and generally considered to be getting increasingly miserly, Rembrandt charged hefty fees from his students, and also made money from the sale of their artworks.

Each student’s parents had to pay him one hundred guilders, even though he did not provide lodging for them, contrary to the usual practice at the time.

Rembrandt of course also had his students assist him in producing his portraits, and memorably had a pupil paint the hands in an important commission of a leading churchman, after the sitter had left the studio.

He would often bid secretly on sales of his own prints to increase the market value of his works. Rembrandt would also deliberately print plates of etchings when they were half complete, so that he could subsequently sell the completed prints as independent works.

He chose to spend very little on his home, and ate only a piece of herring or cheese for lunch. His money-pinching habits were now so ridiculed that his students used to play pranks on him by painting realistic coins on the floor, which Rembrandt spontaneously bent to pick up.

In December 1660, Rembrandt’s finances were in such a parlous state his assets were taken over by his mistress

Hendrickje, and his son Titus.

They dealt with his creditors in exchange for his artworks, leaving Rembrandt with no control over his business matters even as he continued to paint and teach.

Finally, Rembrandt made a successful application for ‘cessio

bonorum’, a more respectable form of bankruptcy that avoided imprisonment.

However, he lost all of his collections, and all of his paintings, which were sold off at pitifully cheap prices.

He was even forced to sell his wife Saskia’s tomb.

But his passion for collecting couldn’t be restrained, and even though he was destitute, he simply could not stop himself from putting in an offer for a Holbein painting that had come up for sale at the same time.

He was, of course, a far greater painter than Holbein, and in any number of his searing self-portraits, he reveals how much the turmoil of his life was etched onto his face.

Perhaps even Rembrandt himself did not fully understand one fact: despite his irksome ways, every few weeks he was creating some of the most piercing and magnificent paintings in our world’s history.

Domenikos Theotokopoulos, known as El Greco, the Greek, (1541-1614) was an outsider – a strange young man who came to Spain from his native Crete to seek advancement.

He was quickly to establish his reputation as an artist of remarkable powers, at the fulcrum of Spanish society in the court of King Phillip II.

His painterly style placed him at the centre of many romanticised accounts of his life, positioning him as a mystic, a tortured solitary genius.

Perhaps the character of the man, certainly when he was in Venice and Rome as an apprentice painter, can best be understood through one of the key moments of his life.

When asked his opinion of Michelangelo, then dead but a preeminent artist whose legacy must have weighed heavily on the shoulders of aspiring painters, El Greco replied that ‘he was a good man, but he did not know how to paint.’

He further dismissed The Last Judgement in the Sistine

Chapel, offering the Pope his services to paint over the entire fresco.

Such audacious rejection of his forebears is borne out in

El Greco’s own inimitable technique.

His paintings are expressionistic, raw, and quite removed from the style of his day.

His greatest masterpiece was created in 1586 when he was forty-five. The Burial of the Count of Orgaz is considered by many to be one of the most astonishing religious paintings of all time.

Measuring an immense 460 cm tall, it is divided into two sections, picturing the heavens in the top half, and the burial scene below.

According to legend, the Count of Orgaz was such a pious and charitable man that St Stephen and St Augustine descended from paradise to bury him with their own hands.

The painting was commissioned for the parish church El

Greco attended, Iglesia de Santo Tomé, near Toledo.

Still housed there, the chapel became a pilgrimage for art lovers, who today continue to marvel at its splendour.

The picture also broke ground by avoiding any references to customary Roman tropes or Venetian motifs.

This landmark work was devoid of any depiction of space, with no horizon, or sky, or perspective.

The figures massing around the burial were portraits of the nobles of Toledo at the time.

Above, in the swirling mists, Christ is the crowning point of a triangle formed by the Madonna and St John the Baptist.

The extraordinary way that the upper and lower sections are brought together compositionally has entranced viewers since the day it was painted, his figures shimmering and dancing across the painting with a dazzling glow.

Though the painting led many to consider El Greco a

Mannerist, the technique that is often referred to as Late Renaissance, in fact its influence is more reminiscent of

Byzantine art.

It was worlds apart from his contemporaries in its dramatic, expressionistic approach.

Tortured bodies, twisting limbs and extraordinary choices of colour make him a favourite of 20th-century artists, who revisited his grand canvases after El Greco’s works had spent hundreds of years in obscurity.

Picasso acknowledged the influence of El Greco on his masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, especially the painting Opening of the Fifth Seal (1608–14) which he studied carefully.

El Greco had earlier in life moved to Venice in order to become a disciple of Titian, in whose studio he is believed to have worked.

Even at a young age, and as an apprentice, his peers recognised his formidable skills, and perhaps this early success and regard from fellow artists created a somewhat arrogant strain in the man.

Certainly by the time he had reached Rome he had begun to accrue enemies. The architect Pirro Ligorio referred to him as the ‘foolish foreigner’, and a quarrel with his leading patron Farnese ended with El Greco being asked to leave his home within the benefactor’s grand palazzo.

He probably chose to leave for Spain because his rivals had ensured he received a frosty reception amongst the glitterati of the Roman art world.

When he moved to Toledo, then a religious centre of Spain, the ancient city was the location of an important monastery, and a palace of overwhelming magnificence was under construction.

King Phillip II was in need of artists, finding that many of the celebrity painters of the day were unwilling to come to Spain, a relative backwater culturally compared to the might of High Renaissance Italy.

Having befriended various individuals connected to the royal project, El Greco received a commission to paint for the cathedral.

But despite successive assignments for the king, El Greco never achieved the status of court painter that he had envisaged for himself.

Two major works that he completed were disliked by the monarch – Phillip was set against the use of living people as models for religious scenes, and the un-godly elevation of style over content.

The painter’s self-regard and robust ego were also taken dimly; his commissions slowed down after complaints about many aspects of his process.

Rumours were spread that he suffered from astigmatism, and it was this that accounted for the strangely elongated figures in his paintings.

Many works were consigned to minor churches and municipal buildings, rather than taking their place in more stately and august locations.

Despite his career not taking him to the heights he wished, El Greco did enjoy considerable success in his lifetime, enabling him to live in a style that was certainly lavish.

He occupied a twenty-four room apartment in Toledo, and would regularly hire a band of musicians to play to him whilst he ate. He spent money freely, and enjoyed dressing extravagantly in the latest fashions.

Living in the style of a courtier stretched El Greco beyond his means as a painter, and when he died he had accrued a great many debts.

El Greco must have felt his ‘foreignness’ throughout his life, and always being known as ‘the Greek’ must have constantly amplified his sense of being an outsider.

However he remained loyal to his origins throughout his life, insisting on signing his paintings with his full Greek name, in Greek letters.

By most accounts, he never learnt Spanish, beyond a few phrases.

Yet today, alongside Goya and Velázquez, he is claimed by Spain as one of its very greatest masters.