Tastes differ widely about El Greco—more perhaps than about any
other of the old masters. Moreover, English students who have not been to Spain tend to misjudge the painter whose best work is mainly at Toledo, and who is by no means adequately represented at our National Gallery. Yet for some of us this sixteenth-century Cretan, who carried the Byzantine traditions over to Italy and Spain, is strangely fascinating. Mr. Frank Mutter's able and judicious mono- graph on El Greco (Methuen, 30s.), with its hundred good reproductions of pictures, should increase the number of the master's admirers by explaining his aims. His power of design and his intense religious feeling are pre-eminent among his qualities. Mr. Rutter's comparisons with other great painters seem irrelevant. El Greco was a lonely figure in
Western art. * * * *
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