El Greco's "Purification of the Temple." Introduction by Enriqueta Harris.
(Lund Humphries. 4s. 6d.)
THIS is number two of a new series of booklets each volume of which will deal with a single masterpiece, most of them drawn from the National Gallery. The frontispiece shows the picture itself, and after a short text follow twenty-two details of it, and of other pictures that bear on it. The idea is a good one, and in the present case is excellently carried out. It might perhaps be justifi- ably said that the introduction is too short or too long ; it gives a few facts about the painter's life„ and contemporary influences and conditions, but not enough to be really significant. Also, space should hardly have been wasted by a reference to the legend of El Greco's " madness " or by- the counter that "the strange and individual character of his work," in other words, its excellence- " need not be explained by any mental or physical deformity." His "madness," like Blake's, was a fiction created by academic painters and insensitive, laymen to excuse their own shortcomings. But otherwise, and especially where it deals with the picture itself, the text is admirable; sensitive and free from didacticism.
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