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Getting practically no ordinary education, Picasso worked off his ingenuity in drawing and painting at home. When he was 14, his father moved to Barcelona to take a post as professor in the School of Fine Arts. Picasso's precocity was already such that at 15 he left his father's instruction and set up his own studio, first in Madrid and later in Barcelona. His painting at this time was perfectly strong, finished and professional. Too poor to furnish his Barcelona studio, he amused himselt by painting on the walls, in great detail, the missing pieces of furniture.
Paris. What Rome is to the Catholic priesthood, Paris has been for centuries to the artists of Europe. Among the hundreds of hopefuls who arrived there m 1900 at the dewy dawn of a destructive century, 19-year-old Pablo Picasso was remarkable for his impressionability, his facility his profound self-confidence. Standing one day in admiration before a painting by Toulouse-Lautrec, whose bold draftsmanship and garish atmosphere he was then busily imitating, he was heard to murmur, "All the same, I paint better than he does.
But it was not until he had gone back to Spain for another year that Picasso found a style of his own. The paintings of his "Blue Period" were done in that year, 1903, and during the next year or so in Paris.
Fernande Olivier, a model who lived with him then and for the next 14 years, has said he was ". . . small, black, stubby, unquiet, disquieting, with sombre, deep, piercing, strange, almost fixed eyes. Awkward gestures, feminine hands, ill-dressed, ill-cared for. A thick, black, brilliant forelock divided the intelligent protuberant forehead. Half-bohemian, half-workman in his dress; his overlong hair swept the collar of a tired coat."
For eight years Picasso and Fernande lived in Montmartre in the famous "bateau lavoir" (floating laundry) at 13 Rue Ravignan (now Place Emile Goudeau), a fantastic barrack tenanted by painters, sculptors, writers, cartoonists, laundresses and pushcart peddlers. Picasso was Spanishly jealous of his 18-year-old mistress—though he was grateful enough that the ogling coal dealer neglected to leave a bill. To keep her at home he did the marketing himself, dressed in the cap, espadrilles and blue jeans of a workman, plus a famous white-polka-dotted red shirt that cost him less than two francs. The mystic poet, Max Jacob, helped Picasso, who steadfastly refused to do any "commercial" work. A terrific and efficient worker, to avoid interruptions Picasso soon took to painting all night, a habit which may have had something to do with the blueness of the Blue Period.
In any case, these new paintings by the little Spaniard from Málaga were extraordinary affairs. The sombre, elongated El Grecos which Picasso had studied in Madrid certainly influenced his manner; so did the predominantly blue compositions of Cezanne. But, unlike Cezanne and still more unlike the Impressionists, Picasso was uninterested in Nature, painted to make paintings, painted to express himself.