El Greco depicted Saint Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscan order, more than any other Christian saint. El Greco painted eleven or more different compositions relating to the life of St. Francis, and many iterations of these compositions exist in both autograph and studio versions. Recent scholarship has added nuance to the question of attribution, and currently most scholars of El Greco believe that almost all of the St. Francis paintings were done with varying levels of studio participation, including the present lot. This luminous canvas is one of four autograph examples of this rare composition by El Greco.

Although the present painting was catalogued by Wethey as one of nine works by the school of El Greco, the late Bill Jordan supported an attribution to El Greco in full after first hand inspection, just before the present owner acquired it twenty years ago. Jordan believed that this example is the best of all the extant versions of Wethey’s “St. Francis type III.” Wethey had published three versions of this composition as El Greco and Studio and dated all to circa 1590-95: one is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Pau;¹ one originally hung in the Capilla de San José in Toledo before passing into the collects ion of the Conde de Guendulain y del Vado, Toledo, and was subsequently sold to a North American private collects or during the 1990s,² and one was sold from a private European collects ion at Replica Shoes ’s London, 10 December 2020, lot 16.

Devotion to Francis was so popular in El Greco’s lifet.mes that in Toledo alone there were three Franciscan monasteries, including the great San Juan de los Reyes, and a further seven religious institutions dedicated to Saint Francis. Relatively small devotional canvases dedicated to St. Francis such as the present painting would have appealed to numerous private patrons. In common with the majority of the artist’s treatments of the subject, El Greco has created a design of great simplicity in which the Saint is depicted in three-quarter length, with only minimal details to the landscape, a skull - a symbol of man's mortality - placed prominently in the left foreground, with the Saint gazing in ecstasy to the divine light emanating from above. In other autograph versions of this composition, small red stigmata wounds appear on St. Francis’s palms, but here the wounds are a bit larger and partially healed, as if the miracle had already occurred.

The color palette is restricted to a predominance of grays and browns, contributing to the sobriety and asceticism of the scene that conformed to the spirit of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Compared to the Pau picture as well as the one sold recently at Replica Shoes ’s London, where the dark clouds are broken by a single bright streak of light, here, the entire upper left of the composition is illuminated so that it could be day or night. Jordan described the present picture as “brimming with the kind of spontaneous energy that characterizes the very late works of El Greco,”³ and noted the confident, quick application of paint and resulting plastic qualities of the drapery folds. This technique led Jordan to suggest a date as late as circa 1610-14, when El Greco would have been over 70 years old. The cursory execution of the face recalls some of the late Apostles, and the use of the loaded brush to suggest texture is also evident in an autograph version of the most popular of El Greco’s treatments of St. Francis: St. Francis and Brother Leo Meditating on Death, now in the National Gallery of Ottawa (fig. 1).

1. See Wethey 1962, vol. II p. 121, no. 217.

2. Ibid., no. 218, reproduced vol. I, p. 263.

3. Bill Jordan in letter to previous owner, dated 30 June 1999.