The Immaculate Conception (El Greco, Toledo) to a metropolis like Madrid. However, following a string of legal disputes over what El Greco deemed inadequate pay for his work, the Cretan master failed to achieve King Phillip's approval. Consequently, El Greco remained in Toledo for the rest of his life, where he was well-received by his contemporaries. One such contemporary was the Spanish preacher and poet Hortensio Félix Paravicino, who remarked that, "Crete gave him life and the painter's craft, Toledo a better homeland, where through Death he began to achieve eternal life." Besides the appreciation shown towards El Greco by his contemporaries, he also found success
Art of El Greco down his experiences in "The Spanische Reise", the first book which established El Greco as a great painter of the past. In El Greco's work, Meier-Graefe found foreshadowings of modernity. To the Der Blaue Reiter group in Munich in 1912, El Greco typified that "mystical inner construction" that it was the task of their generation to rediscover. To the English artist and critic Roger Fry in 1920, El Greco was the archetypal genius who did as he thought best "with complete indifference to what effect the right expression might have on the public". Fry described El Greco as "an old