Aureliano de Beruete was the most prominent and innovative Spanish landscape artist of his generation, rivalled only by Darío de Regoyos. He studied under Carlos de Haes at the Special School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving of Madrid in 1874, and in 1878 he met Martín Rico, who influenced his quest for intense light and beautiful colours. He later shifted towards more direct, immediate impressions from life, always working en plein air and developing a style that can be classified as Impressionist after 1903. In his final years he used pure colours, tinted shadows and broad brushstrokes, a technique also influenced by his profound knowledge of Velázquez's work, on which he wrote an important monograph in 1898.

Although he was a cosmopolitan artist, working in France, Switzerland and Germany, Beruete had a special fondness for the Castilian countryside. His erudition and involvement with the Free Institute of Education predisposed him to the aesthetic revival of that landscape, to which he devoted most of his works. The Shrine of La Virgen del Valle, Toledo, eloquently illustrates his focus on the countryside around Castile's old towns and cities, where he captured the rugged contours of the terrain as well as a monumental or historical point of reference, thus creating an intrinsically unified vision of nature and its historic past. These cities included Segovia, Ávila, Cuenca and Toledo, though the latter always held a special fascination for him. He painted there in 1875 and 1883, and starting in 1894 he spent every October until his death working in Toledo.

The artist painted this piece during his stay in 1899, when he also made The Gardens of Alcántara Bridge: Toledo, The Garden of El Caballo: Toledo, The Gorge at Toledo, Tavera Hospital from the River: Toledo (all four in private collections in Madrid) and two works entitled Garden of Toledo. Only the first of this group and the work discussed here were selected for the major exhibition held in 1912 shortly after his death, at the studio of his friend Joaquín Sorolla, where this painting was listed as number 190.

The work is a good example of an interesting transition stage prior to his Impressionist period. Beruete was well-acquainted with this particular shrine, for in 1893 he had painted a sweeping panorama of the city from its lofty tower: View of Toledo from the Shrine of La Virgen del Valle (private collection). The artist chose a low-angle perspective in this composition, leaving little room for the sky, as he would later do in his views of the Alps painted in 1905–1907. Using a palette of fresh green and ochre tones, the painting shows a subtle contrast between the sunlit area where the 17th-century shrine stands and the parts in shadow, where strokes of colour hint at the Impressionist orientation of his later work. [Javier Barón Thaidigsmann]