3-097-981 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Manuel Bartolomé Cossío, 1908. Portrait of Spanish art historian Manuel Bartolomé Cossío (1857-1935), painted in the same year that Cossío's important reference monograph on El Greco was published, a work that made a major contribution to our understanding of the artist. The book appears on the table, just below the image of The Gentleman with His Hand on His Chest by El Greco, whose pictorial influence strongly animates the portrait. In his book, Cossío included a photographic reproduction of one of Sorolla 's paintings, ¡Triste herencia! (Sad Inheritance!), as one of the testimonies of the growing influence of the Cretan artist in modern times. Cossío was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Prado Museum, and a figure of the highest relevance in the Institución Libre de Enseñanza and in the renewal of Spanish cultural life in the final decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century.