El Greco

Doménikos Theotokópoulos was born in 1541 in Candia (modern Heraklion) on Crete, then a possession of the Republic of Venice; a few scholars name Fodele instead. His father was a merchant and tax collector, and his older brother Manoússos also became a merchant. He trained as an icon painter in the Cretan tradition and was recorded as a master painter in 1563. Around 1567 he went to Venice, where he absorbed the colour of Titian, whose disciple Giulio Clovio would later call him, and the dynamic compositions of Tintoretto. About 1570 he moved to Rome and entered the circle of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, joining the Academy of Saint Luke in 1572. Unable to win major commissions there, he left for Spain and was in Toledo by July 1577. His son Jorge Manuel was born in 1578. He died in Toledo on 7 April 1614 and was buried at Santo Domingo el Antiguo.

In Toledo his manner grew ever more personal, with elongated, contorted figures and a restless handling of colour and light. His first major Spanish commission was The Disrobing of Christ (1577–1579, sacristy of Toledo Cathedral). The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586–1588, Santo Tomé, Toledo) sets a crowd of Toledan notables beneath a heavenly court of Christ, the Virgin and saints. He painted View of Toledo (about 1596–1600, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) as a stormy landscape of dark clouds, green hills and pale buildings. In his last years he made Laocoön (about 1610–1614, National Gallery of Art, Washington), his only mythological subject, with the city of Toledo glimpsed behind the writhing figures. Philip II disliked the pictures he commissioned for the Escorial, so Toledo's clergy became his chief patrons.

After his death El Greco was largely neglected for more than a century, and early writers such as Palomino and Ceán Bermúdez dismissed his mature work. Romantic critics revived interest in the nineteenth century, and Manuel Bartolomé Cossío published the first full catalogue in 1908. Later painters, Picasso among them, took inspiration from him. In Toledo he ran a large workshop that produced altar frames and sculpture as well as paintings, and he repeated popular compositions in several versions; his son Jorge Manuel inherited the studio and kept reproducing his father's designs. Lawsuits over payment troubled his last years. For a painter in oils who reproduces his work, El Greco offers loose, rapid brushwork, vivid colour set against stormy darks, and tall compositions in which light carries the drama.

Biographical details on Wikipedia.