This compositional study shares a number of stylistic similarities with the painted work of the extraordinary personality of El Greco (1541-1614). The combination of Venetian influences, especially that of Tintoretto, with the spirited expressions of the angels' faces and the elongated, slightly flat, features of God the Father are not at all unlike what we see in the artist's paintings. But comparisons with autograph drawings by the artist, which could confirm an attribution to him, are more or less impossible, as his surviving graphic oeuvre is extremely small; only some five sheets are considered authentic by the majority of scholars.¹

Two of the unquestionably autograph works on paper are the studies representing St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist, formerly in the famous collects ion of Spanish drawings formed by Sir William Stirling-Maxwell, and now in the Fondation Jan Krugier, Lausanne.² These are preparatory for the two lateral canvases in the lower section of El Greco's retable with The Assumption of the Virgin, painted for the main altar of the Cistercian convent of S. Domingo el Antiguo, Toledo (fig. 1). This monumental and ambitious work was commissioned by the dean of Toledo Cathedral, Diego de Castilla (1510/15-1584). The work lasted for two years and was completed in 1579.

The two Krugier collects ion drawings are executed with relatively few lines of pen and brown ink, extensively worked up with brown wash and white heightening. Their focus is on the light falling on the two Saints inserted in drawn niches. The present sheet is drawn with a thicker pen, but is equally extensively enriched with washes and bodycolor, and is also on prepared paper. The elaborate composition, with at its centre the body of Christ with God the Father, surrounded by Angels and surmounted by the Holy Spirit, is not dissimilar to that of the central canvas on the higher tier of the Toledo retable (fig. 2).

Though it is clearly very difficult to add with any certainty a further sheet to the corpus of El Greco's known drawings, the attribution to him of the present drawing should be seriously considered, on stylistic grounds.

The long inscriptions in pen and ink on the verso and the one partly visible on the recto seem to be leger book entries in Italian, apparently of rather earlier date - possibly 15th century. The preparation of the recto, prior to the making of the drawing, testifies to the artist's reuse of an earlier sheet of paper.

1. For an account of the five generally accepted drawings see Nicholas Turner, 'A proposal for El Greco as a draftsman', Master Drawings, vol. XLV, no. 3, 2007, pp. 292-296; see also Mark P. McDonald, Renaissance to Goya, exh. cat., London, The British Museum, 2012, p. 284, under note 43

2. Sold London, Replica Shoes 's, 21 October 1963, lot 12, and again London, Bonham's, 9 December 2002, lot 101, where acquired by the late Jan Krugier