Saint Martin and the Beggar

Saint Martin and the Beggar is a canvas that El Greco painted around 1597-1599 for the Chapel of San José in Toledo, where it formed part of a set of altarpieces commissioned under a contract signed in November 1597 with Martín Ramírez de Zayas. The subject was not specified in that document; the two side paintings were decided later. Its choice was not accidental, since Saint Martin of Tours was the patron saint of the two Martíns linked to the chapel, and the scene of the shared cloak highlighted the generosity of the man who financed the works.

The composition is calm and almost luminous. Saint Martin, with a youthful face, rides a white horse and cuts his green cloak without looking at the beggar, as if absorbed in the meaning of his gesture. He is dressed in sixteenth-century fashion, with gold-damascened armour and a ruff. The beggar, thin, barefoot and half-naked, with a bandage on one leg, occupies the lower part of the picture. The palette of greens, blues, greys and silvery whites gives the scene an almost fairytale air.

In the background a heavily transformed Toledo can be recognised, with the Alcántara bridge and the San Servando castle, while the lower right corner shows the Antolínez island and a waterwheel on the Tagus. Some scholars have suggested that the rider may have served as a reference for Rubens's equestrian portrait of the Duke of Lerma, though this remains a hypothesis. Wethey considered this version one of the artist's finest achievements, far superior to the surviving copies.

The painting left the chapel in 1906, passed through a Parisian dealer and, after being acquired by the American collector Peter Widener, ended up at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Painter

El Greco

Date

1597

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

194 × 103 cm

Museum

Widener Collection, Washington, D.C.

Movement

Mannerism

Genre

religious art

Depicts

armor, Martin of Tours, Arabian horse, rein, male toplessness, beggar, cloak, ruff

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