The mystery of the Lady in the Fur Wrap

The mystery of the Lady in the Fur Wrap
Is it an El Greco? National Gallery hopes an x-ray of a great work will end the debate

Maev Kennedy, arts and heritage correspondent
Saturday February 7, 2004
The Guardian

There is something very odd about the Lady in the Fur Wrap, among all the blue-white tortured bodies in the El Greco exhibition opening at the National Gallery next week. She is positively pink.

As part of the first major British exhibition on the work of the master, the National Gallery is about to peer under the Lady's sumptuous cloak to see what secrets she is hiding. The hope is to resolve once and for all the centuries-old arguments about whether she is genuinely the work of El Greco.

The painter's strange, anguished figures have enthralled artists and bewildered viewers for centuries, his saints, virgins and martyrs stretched as though tortured on a rack, and lit by flashes of lightning.

The Lady, in contrast, clearly has blood in her veins, and in her pink cheeks and red lips. If genuine, she is the only portrait of an evidently real woman by El Greco, and the only woman among all his blanched saints and ecstatic virgins who looks remotely like a warm-blooded, sexy human being.

Xavier Bray of the National Gallery, the co-curator of the exhibition, has become convinced she is the real thing. "The more I look at her, the more I move to the view that she is by El Greco. Even the slight awkwardness in the painting, like the treatment of the hand, almost makes it certain that she is El Greco - there's no other painter like him."

Last week in London, he took the glass off the painting, and hung it beside an undoubted El Greco, the Mater Dolorosa, now owned by a museum in Strasbourg. He was convinced both are by the same artist - and based on the same model, believed by some to be his beautiful mistress, Jeronima de las Cuevas.

However, Mr Bray's co-curator, Gabriele Finaldi, formerly of the National Gallery and now a director of the Prado in Madrid, which has loaned many of its superb El Grecos, has been moving in the opposite direction.

"The Lady in the Fur Wrap is becoming an increasingly problematic picture. In other words it looks less and less like an El Greco, and even those who defend his authorship seem less and less convinced."

The exhibition has already been seen at the Metropolitan in New York, where Mr Finaldi said the Lady, now owned by the Burrell Collection in Glasgow, was strikingly the odd man out. "It is a fine and beautiful picture, but there are many reasons to doubt that it is by El Greco."

Mr Bray responded fiercely: "I am looking forward very much to resuming the debate with Gabriele." He hopes that an x-ray, the first in recent times, may help resolve the dispute.

"She has only been x-rayed once, a long time ago, but the technology has improved so much we hope to be able to see a lot more now. We may find under-drawing which could help solve the question of authorship, and it would be in teresting to see if she was painted over another portrait - there could be a man under that cloak."

El Greco was born Domenikos Theotokopoulos in Crete, in 1541, where he trained as an icon painter. He moved to Venice, where he added the sensuous techniques of that city's masters of oil painting to the spiritual intensity and stylisation of figures and space learned in Crete.

After a brief period in Madrid, he moved to Toledo, where he lived and worked until his death in 1615. He lived openly with Jeronima, but they never married - Mr Bray thinks the painter probably had a wife still living.

El Greco and Jeronima had a cherished son, Jorge. The painter was so proud of him that he included the child in one of his most famous works, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz. The painting was a sensation in his lifetime, and is still one of Toledo's greatest tourist attractions, too large and too treasured ever to be loaned.

The Lady in a Fur Wrap has always caused the experts problems: she was exhibited 170 years ago in London as "the daughter of El Greco" but there are no records of his having a daughter. Mr Bray believes she is a witness to a great love affair, a portrait of Jeronima painted by El Greco for himself.

Whatever the outcome of the inquest into the Lady in the Fur Wrap, the chances are El Greco would have sued.

As part of his research for the exhibition, Mr Bray has tracked the startling list of legal actions which El Greco piled up in his life: he went to law incessantly about being paid, about not being paid enough and about the impudence of clients requesting changes. He also went to law about being taxed, establishing a landmark ruling that he was a practitioner of the "liberal arts", a peer of philosophers and poets, not a mere craftsman who should be taxed like any plasterer or carpenter.

Lady in a Fur Wrap:

http://www.portraitsbyturner.com/gallery4/greco1c.jpg