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View of Toledo

ca. 1599–1600
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 619
Writing to the sculptor Auguste Rodin after having been astonished by this painting in Paris in 1908, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke described how “splintered light tills the ground, turning it over, tearing into it and bringing up here and there pale green meadows behind the trees standing like insomniacs.” Regarded as El Greco’s greatest landscape, it portrays Toledo, the city where he lived and worked for most of his life. But it is an emotive rather than a documentary vision that not only imaginatively revises the skyline—most notably, the cathedral has been moved—but also distorts architecture and landscape such that they are fully in service of the kind of drama Rilke and other modernists appreciated in his work.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: View of Toledo
  • Artist: El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) (Greek, Iráklion (Candia) 1541–1614 Toledo)
  • Date: ca. 1599–1600
  • Medium: Oil on canvas
  • Dimensions: 47 3/4 x 42 3/4 in. (121.3 x 108.6 cm)
  • Classification: Paintings
  • Credit Line: H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929
  • Object Number: 29.100.6
  • Curatorial Department: European Paintings

More Artwork

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Christ Carrying the Cross, El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) Greek, Oil on canvas
Christ Carrying the Cross
El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos)
ca. 1577–87
Saint Jerome as Scholar, El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) Greek, Oil on canvas
Saint Jerome as Scholar
El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos)
ca. 1610
Portrait of an Old Man, El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) Greek, Oil on canvas
Portrait of an Old Man
El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos)
ca. 1595–1600
Saint Andrew, El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) Greek, Oil on canvas
Saint Andrew
El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos)
ca. 1610
Christ Healing the Blind, El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) Greek, Oil on canvas
Christ Healing the Blind
El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos)
ca. 1570

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