Holy Family (El Greco, Hospital de Tavera) Holy Family (El Greco, Hospital de Tavera) Holy Family is a 1595 oil on canvas painting by El Greco, painted during his time in Toledo and now in the Hospital de Tavera in that city. The work is very similar to those painted by the same artist during his stay in Rome. The artist frequently returned to the theme of the Holy Family. Though this work has similarities to his work on the same subject now in the Museum of Santa Cruz, he has omitted the infant John the Baptist, painted the Virgin as a nursing Madonna and altered the
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