Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian

post carried a better salary: three thousand pesetas a year, almost exactly £100, or $482. At the end of the term the family packed their bags. They were to spend the summer holidays of 1895 in Málaga, taking the train, which would carry them there by way of Madrid. Picasso’s luggage included a great many pictures: he had tried to sell some in a little exhibition at an umbrella-maker’s shop (in the doorway, says Gómez de La Serna), but that had not been markedly successful; and he had given a few to Dr. Costales. The drawings and paintings that remained might be grouped in the following categories: juvenilia (though even among these there is the occasional prophetic pure, unhesitating line, especially in the bulls), boyish “historical” scenes, the interiors and other paintings that show the influence of his father’s friends Ferrándiz and Muñoz Degrain, sketch-books of great interest to the art-historian, drawings of hands (all his life he was preoccupied with hands, singly and in pairs), and these strong, firmly-painted canvases of his twelfth and thirteenth years. There were also two little things that could be lumped in with the juvenilia if they did not seem to have a particular significance for the later years—they are little cut-outs, a dog and a dove, that only need to be stuck to a canvas to be the first of all collages. And these small paper silhouettes are perhaps the only examples of his father’s direct influence in the whole collection.

      

      A couple of days or so in Madrid, after the prolonged horror of a creeping Spanish train—more than thirty hours to cover the five hundred miles of line winding about the mountains, with four changes and innumerable stops—a Madrid at the height of its blazing summer, cannot have been very gratifying; nor can the travelers have been at their most receptive. However, Don José and his son did visit the Prado, and there for the first time in his life Picasso saw Velásquez, El Greco, Zurbarán, Ribera, Goya, to say nothing of Valdes Léal, Murillo, and the host of illustrious foreigners.

      Whether the immense indigestible wealth, the heat, his fatigue, and the lighting that made it almost impossible to see “Las Meninas” whole, oppressed him or not, he had recovered his spirits by the time they reached Málaga, four hundred miles farther on. They were welcomed, feasted, made much of. Their native air, their native speech and food, revived the returning exiles, and Pablo, still the only boy the Ruiz brothers had between them, was particularly caressed. He was always in his element at a party—conviviality was meat and drink to the abstemious Picasso all his life—and this may well have been the happiest holiday that he spent in Málaga. He was so taken up with having fun that his work, even his sketching, shows a falling-off in quantity. However, he did paint a picture of the kitchen, and he did make a very delicate pencil drawing of their old servant Carmen, with her sleeves rolled up as once she had rolled them up to lead him to school by force; and perhaps influenced by the familiar atmosphere recovered, he signed it P. Ruiz, as he had done in former days.

      His relations were proud of him. Painting was now no longer the desperate career that it had been when Don José made his choice, and they may even have distinguished between the canvases he brought back from La Coruña and his father’s work. In any case, despite the shaky condition of the peseta, twenty years of peace had led the richer sort to buy paintings more frequently, and Muñoz Degrain, Moreno Carbonero, and other men they knew were doing well in Madrid, so well that the State bought their pictures for the Museum of Modern Art in the capital itself. Pablo’s manifest destiny was accepted without question: Dr. Salvador, who had grown more prosperous still, hired an aged seafaring man as model and gave his nephew a duro a day to paint him, five pesetas, a sum at least twice as much as a laborer could earn.

      

      Towards the end of the summer they took to the sea once more, coasting along northwards past Almería, Cartagena, Alicante, and Valencia; and the September sea was so kind that during the voyage Picasso could paint, not hurried sketches of the shore, but oil upon canvas, and that of a considerable size. After three days of sailing, Barcelona came in sight, an immensely busy port with the vast city spreading wide on either hand, the sinister Montjuich to the left, Tibidabo rising behind, and mountains beyond: to the right, factory chimneys, gasworks, palm-trees, industrial suburbs.

      As soon as he set foot on the quay, Picasso found that once again he was surrounded by a different language. All around him the people spoke Catalan, as incomprehensible as Gallego or even more so; and many of them were dressed in the fashion of their country—a red bonnet like a Phrygian cap, curiously plaited rope-soled cloth shoes, a broad red sash, a little waistcoat.

      And as the Ruizes walked along to the lodging that a friend had found for them in the Calle Cristina, not far from their landing-place, this impression of being abroad grew stronger. For the Barcelona of 1895 was a wholly European city, something they had never known before; a huge, busy, and intensely Catalan city, with half a million people in it, all talking their own language and all living according to customs and values that were foreign not only to Málaga but to Madrid and the whole of the rest of the Peninsula. The thirteen-year-old Pablo could not have felt more a stranger if he had landed in Marseilles or Genoa: once again he was entirely uprooted.

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      THIS is not the place for a detailed history of Catalonia and its capital: but the culture into which Picasso was plunged was determined by that history, and since he passed his most formative years in Barcelona, becoming integrated with the Catalan community, speaking their language, and making his earliest and most lasting friends among them, some modest outline is essential to an understanding of the forces that worked upon the vital years of his adolescence and early manhood.

      In the middle ages Catalonia was an independent country, lying on both sides of the eastern Pyrenees, but with most of its territory in the Peninsula. The Moors had held it for a while, but Charlemagne soon thrust them out, and in the ninth century Wilfred the Shaggy cut himself free from all foreign allegiance and ruled without contest as a sovereign chief of state.

      His country was poor in natural resources, but rich in an active, enterprising population. (“From a stone the Catalan will draw bread” says the Spanish proverb.) After the turmoil of the Moorish wars those who lived upon the coast early returned to commerce, carrying on the Roman tradition; and in spite of their indifferent harbors they soon became one of the most important trading nations in the Mediterranean. Barcelona rivaled Venice and Genoa; Catalan ships sailed to the North Sea and the Baltic, to Alexandria and points beyond; Catalan maritime law and marine insurance were accepted as standard far and wide; and while the other states of Spain were shut off from the rest of Europe, preoccupied with centuries of war against the Moors or with fratricidal struggles for power, Catalonia flourished, with a splendid literature of its own, a highly distinctive architecture, a school of painting which bears comparison with that of Lombardy, a renowned university, and a general culture that had long been wide open to influences from France, Provence, Italy, Byzantium, and the learned Moors and Jews of southern and central Spain.

      This was the golden age to which Picasso’s Catalan friends looked back with a resentful nostalgia—the age when the Counts of Barcelona, who by marriage had become kings of Aragón, carried the Catalan tongue far beyond its original limits, conquering the Balearic islands, Sicily, Naples, Corsica, Sardinia, the Moorish Valencia, and all the Moslem country down to Murcia, an age whose architectural glories still filled their city.

      Even in the early seventeenth century Cervantes could speak of Barcelona as “the seat of courtesy, the haven of strangers, the refuge of the distressed, the mother of the valiant, the champion of the wronged, the abode of true friendship, unique both in beauty and situation,” but although the splendid buildings were still there, the glory was already gone. That unhappy marriage with the heiress of Aragón was followed in the course of time by the union of Aragón and Castilla in the persons of Ferdinand and Isabella. Their heir, the Habsburg Charles V, inherited a united Spain from which the last Moorish rulers had been expelled, together with vast possessions in America; and already Catalonia was an oppressed country, cut off from all commerce with the New World, the great fresh source of wealth. For centuries the Castilians had disliked their industrious neighbors, and the Emperor Charles, who knew little of Spain when he came to the throne, sided with the Castilians; and so it continued, generation after generation, with what the