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Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973) is best known as a Cubist, but he was constantly experimenting with materials and technique in a life-long search for new forms of expression. He got his start, however, in the same way as every other artist of his generation, by studying traditional realism. The young Picasso was fortunate to have an early start through his father, who was an artist (specializing in still life and bird paintings) and drawing teacher. His parents recognized his propensity for art at an early age and his father gave Picasso his first drawing lessons and arranged his son’s first ‘exhibit’, in a local barber shop, at the age of thirteen. Very much a traditionalist, his father was eager for his son to have a formal education and as many opportunities for study as possible, taking him to museums in Barcelona and Prado to study masterworks and enrolling him in local classes. When Pablo’s father got a post at the Barcelona Academy, the young Picasso took the entrance exams to enter as a student. Picasso was only thirteen, but it is said his drawings impressed the judges greatly. His father even helped the boy establish his first painting studio (with frequent check-ins from his parent), where the boy completed many of these first paintings, such as Portrait of Aunt Pepa and The Altar Boy. The high point of Picasso’s early career, the narrative painting Science and Charity (in which his family served as the models) was completed for a school competition when he was sixteen years old. His parents decided to send him to Madrid in that same year to study at the Academy of Fine Arts there, but although he is said to have taken frequent visits to the Museo del Prado to study Velazquez and other Spanish masters, he was already becoming restive and attended classes infrequently. After only six months he moved back to Barcelona and began to branch out on his own, becoming involved in the avant-garde art scene and taking steps to consciously reject the academic tradition. By the time Picasso was twenty, he had thoroughly embraced modernism, as can be seen in his painting Child with a Dove. 

The Barefoot Girl, oil on canvas, 1895

Portrait of Aunt Pepa, oil on canvas, 1896

The Altar Boy, oil on canvas, 1896

The Artist’s Father, watercolor on paper, 1896

The Artist’s Mother, pastel on paper, 1896

Self-portrait, oil on canvas, 1896

Science and Charity, oil on canvas, 1897