This is why El Greco seems to chronicle for us our impressions of Toledo, and of Spain. Surely no other painter has lived in a city in such strong agreement with his spirit. Think of the place--wind-swept, heat-dried, extraordinarily austere, yet flushed with colour, ochre-red shading to unusual greens; heaped upon its rocky throne above the yellow flowing Tagus, its rugged silhouette straight cut against a sky hard and clear as enamel; and, beyond, the sierra like a great brown sea in which it all stands as an island starting from the waves. A suggestion of strenuousness seems to linger everywhere, a spirit, personal and keen, cruel almost as the sword-blades the city fashions. The very buildings, placed upon the crags beneath the great hulk of the Alcazar, repeat this impression, they rise in sharp upward and downward lines like an arrangement of swords, and make their appeal by the strange strength of their aspect. The streets are a tortuous net of steep-rising passage-ways. A city strongly itself that has suffered no change, fantastic as a city seen in a dream. Yes, to those who know Toledo, the impression of the character of the city upon El Greco will bring no surprise. His art corresponds perfectly with its setting. Everywhere his work is around you, for El Greco is one of those painters who has but a single home. He built churches and other buildings--the classic façade of the Ayuntamiento, for instance, was modelled on his design; he carved statues, he painted pictures, there are canvases of his in the museum, in the cathedral, and in many of the churches. And in all this mass of work, it is the living force behind it that is the first impression that you gain; a kind of driving power that fascinates you, just as Toledo fascinates you, by reason of its power. El Greco was a painter able to create--that is the secret of it all. And, be it remembered, the artist does not find his matter straight from the springs of his brain, what he is able to see he sets down, and that is all. His art is great in exact measure as it is able to transfer this vision from him to us. In this way El Greco, to whom vision seems to have been the whole of life, does in his pictures transfer to us the entire impression of Toledo, so that it is difficult to speak of his art without making Toledo the refrain.