Know your classic

Pablo Picasso
The Old Jew With a Boy (1903)

This picture was painted at the height of Picasso’s famed blue period, when his paintings had become steeped in this cold, melancholy colour. This was shortly after he moved to Paris from Barcelona and the psychological trigger was the suicide of Picasso’s friend Casagemas. Picasso was still in his late teens, away from home for the first time, and living in very poor conditions. The change, however, was more than a mere change in colour. It was more than anything else the result of a new attitude toward people. Instead of ruthless and satirical studies he now treated his models with sympathy and tenderness. His subjects changed from cafe scenes and Parisian interiors with women in big hats to beggars, prostitutes and convicts. The old Jew, blind, destitute and a member of an outcast race, epitomises the suffering with which Picasso was obsessed at the time. In true romantic fashion he seems to have believed that, as an artist he was rejected and despised. The theme of blindness also appears in other pictures, perhaps reflecting Picasso’s awareness of his father’s failing sight; as well as the theory that the figures in the scene represent Picasso as a young boy and his father Don Jose.