Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

Pablo Picasso painted Coupe, cruche et boîte à lait in the summer of 1906 in Gósol, a rural village set in the Pyrenées of north west Spain. It was here that Picasso would make one of the greatest breakthroughs of his career, developing a style that saw him embrace a more primitive, simplified and stylised visual language that forms the very genesis of the movement that would change the course of modern art: Cubism.

Seeking new inspiration and artistic stimuli, Picasso had left Paris in May, travelling with his muse and lover Fernande Olivier first to Barcelona, where he stayed for a fortnight, before trekking by mule to the isolated medieval village of Gósol. Here, Picasso found an artistic paradise that was a world away from the buzzing cosmopolitan metropolis of Paris and the bohemian world of the Bateau Lavoir in which he had been immersed. Returning to his Spanish roots, Picasso fell under the spell of the ancient, timeless classicism of the Mediterranean. Leaving behind the French symbolist influence that had permeated his contemporaneous Rose period works, he embraced an archaic and simplified aesthetic, painting with a muted palette dominated by ochre and terracotta tones, the colours of the arid, sun bleached landscape in which he was surrounded.

Coupe, cruche et boîte à lait exemplifies this austere and serene ‘classical’ style, as it is sometimes known. Seen in a number of other Gósol paintings of the time, the three objects of this composition – identified as pieces of traditional Gósol pottery – are depicted with a supreme delicacy, the blue of the small cup radiating from the soft, earthy and gentle pink tones that surround it. Indeed, the space that surrounds these simple quotidian objects becomes as important as the pieces themselves, combining to create a composition that radiates a sense of harmony and timeless simplicity.