View of Toledo

View of Toledo places Zuloaga in direct dialogue with El Greco's legendary depiction of the city — the most famous cityscape in Spanish art history. By painting Toledo in 1915, Zuloaga was consciously engaging with a deep art-historical lineage. The Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, which holds this work, was the institution that had nurtured Spanish academic tradition since the eighteenth century; that it acquired a Zuloaga cityscape points to his eventual canonization within the official culture he had long positioned himself against. Toledo's iconic ridge — the Tagus River snaking below the Alcázar and Cathedral — had become for Spanish painters a symbol of the nation's historic core. Zuloaga shared with El Greco an interest in Toledo as a spiritual and psychological landscape rather than a topographical record. His 1915 view would have been painted in the context of renewed interest in El Greco following early twentieth-century reappraisals by critics including Maurice Barrès. The stormy, dramatically lit sky is a deliberate reference to El Greco's treatment of the same subject.

Zuloaga builds the panoramic cityscape with confident horizontals anchored by the Alcázar's silhouette. The sky receives exceptional attention — swirling cloud forms with lurid, greenish-grey light recalling El Greco's supernatural atmosphere. The city itself is rendered in warm ochres against the cool storm sky, a tonal opposition that reads as emotionally charged.