Art of El Greco like a vision, all of the buildings painted glistening white. According to Wethey, in his surviving landscapes, "El Greco demonstrated his characteristic tendency to dramatize rather than to describe". Professor Nicos Hadjinicolaou notes the manner in which El Greco could adjust his style in accordance with his surroundings and stresses the importance of Toledo for the complete development of El Greco's mature style. Wethey asserts that "although Greek by descent and Italian by artistic preparation, the artist became so immersed in the religious environment of Spain that he became the most vital visual representative of Spanish mysticism". The same scholar
El Greco and Paul Lefort helped to promote a widespread revival of interest in his painting. In the 1890s, Spanish painters living in Paris adopted him as their guide and mentor. However, in the popular English-speaking imagination he remained the man who "painted horrors in the Escorial" in the words of Ephraim Chambers' "Cyclopaedia" in 1899. In 1908, Spanish art historian Manuel Bartolomé Cossío published the first comprehensive catalogue of El Greco's works; in this book El Greco was presented as the founder of the Spanish School. The same year Julius Meier-Graefe, a scholar of French Impressionism, traveled in Spain, expecting to