I have said that an impenetrable obscurity lies upon the personal life of El Greco, though here his artistic existence is one of the most insistent facts about us. He seems first to have come to Toledo about 1575 to build the church of _Santo Domingo el Antiguo_, and paint the fine Assumption, the original of which was bought by Don Sebastian de Bourbon, and is now the property of the Infanta Cristina, the picture of the Retablo being only a copy, from which we may infer that his name in the world of Italian art was already known. How else could he have come to Toledo upon direct invitation, unless he came upon chance, hearing of Toledo as a flourishing city, where art was more appreciated and better remunerated than anywhere else in Spain. Then the chapter of the Cathedral ordered the most beautiful Expolio of the sacristy. When the ordered picture was painted, with the group of three women in the foreground, the canons were shocked by the audacious innovation, sent it back to the painter, and refused to pay for it. There was no justification, they asserted, for the presence of the three Maries at the Crucifixion, and they could only consent to receive it if the figures were rubbed out. This El Greco haughtily and properly declined to do. Having painted his picture, he announced himself ready to stand by it, good or ill, as it was, without the slightest alteration. But he demanded his money, whether the chapter took the picture or not. This, too, the chapter refused, whereupon the irate and humiliated artist went to law. It was a long case, lasting for years, during which time El Greco whiled away his enforced leisure at Toledo by marching off to Illescas, where he found time to build the church and paint some noble pictures. His defence against the chapter was a naïve and lame one. He asserted that the presence of the women did not matter, "as they were a long way off," which is not true. But the main fact was true, "it did not matter," any more than radically matters the mediaeval knight in armour behind them. Such inaccuracies and discrepancies leave the artist's genius undiminished. So apparently thought the judges and jury, for El Greco won his case, gained his price, and maintained his artistic dignity without offensive concession to his pride. The women remained, the picture was hung in a frame of jasper and marble, the wood-work wrought by El Greco, which cost the chapter considerably more than the painting, and El Greco himself lived to die an old man in the town he had started in so stormily.