巴布羅·畢加索

Salvio Masoliver, Barcelona

Barbara Woolworth Hutton, New York & Beverly Hills

Private Collection

Acquired from the above in 1963

Paris, Galeries Ambroise Vollard, Exposition de tableaux de F. lturrino et de P. R. Picasso, 1901, no. 45

New York, The Frick Collection & Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, Picasso's Drawings, 1890-1921: Reinventing Tradition, 2011-12, no. 8

Alexandre Cirici Pellicer, Picasso antes de Picasso, Barcelona, 1946, no. 45, illustrated n.p. 

Pierre Daix & Georges Boudaille, Picasso, The Blue & Rose Periods. A Catalogue of the Paintings 1900-1906, Greenwich, 1966, no. 51, illustrated p. 177

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Supplément aux volumes 1-5, Paris, 1978, vol. VI, no. 363, illustrated p. 45

Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso, The Early Years, 1881-1907, Paris, 1981, no. 518, illustrated pp. 214 & 247

John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol 1: 1881-1906, New York, 1991, mentioned p. 9

Executed in 1901, shortly after his arrival in Madrid from Málaga, Village Castillan is a fully realized pastel from Picasso's series of townscapes in Toledo. Having spent the first month of 1901 in Málaga, the city of his birth, with his close friend Carlos Casagemas, Picasso departed for the capital city on January 28 where he briefly found lodging in a pension on the Calle Caballero de Garcia. Several days later on February 4, after finding the rules and regulations of the boardinghouse too restrictive, Picasso signed a one-year lease on an attic apartment at 28 Calle Zurbano.  Despite its lack of heat and austere furnishings, which consisted of a folding cot, a straw mattress, and pine table and chair, the spacious apartment provided ample room for Picasso’s studio. The apartment also served as an editorial office for Arte Joven, an art and literary journal that Picasso agreed to co-edit with the writer Francisco de Asís Soler, an old friend from Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona.

Soler, who had formerly managed a modernista magazine called Luz, served as the primary literary editor for the new publication while Picasso supplied illustrations. The periodical provided Picasso with desperately-needed funds and afforded him the opportunity to expand his reputation as an illustrator in Madrid. The Catalan artistic and literary magazine Pèl & Ploma documented the artist’s spirited arrival in the capital city: “Ruiz Picasso, who recently arrived in Madrid, has not slept for a moment, and has been studying, running around, painting, and sketching in all the streets and alleys of the land of the chulos. The principal fruit of his activity which has seen the light of day in Madrid is a new periodical, supported by good friends, Arte Joven. It has had a good start, particularly on the graphic side” (Pèl & Ploma, March 15, 1901).

This fury of energy swiftly carried Picasso on a forty-eight mile journey outside the metropolis to nearby Toledo. The trip, intended to provide Picasso with an abundance of subject matter for a series of illustrations for Arte Joven, also afforded him the opportunity to closely study works by El Greco in the Cathedral of Toledo. The illustrations were meant to accompany the writer Pio Baroja’s picaresque  novel Aventura, inventos, y mixtificaeciones de Silvestre Paradox, which Soler had acquired for publication. In one particular episode of the novel, the pope is chased out of Rome and forced to disguise himself as a ragged beggar outside the Cathedral of Toledo. Although Picasso did not publish any illustrations of this scene, the passage inspired several studies of peasants and townspeople in and around Toledo. The central figure in Village Castillan, who wears a large Toledano hat and a nondescript dark shawl, may very well represent the concealed beggar-pope from Baroja’s story. Notably, this figure appears in several other studies including Figures from Toledo and Old Man of Toledo with a Walking Stick.

The present work, freshly completed in the early months of 1901, was included in the first major exhibition of Picasso’s work, which opened on June 24, 1901 at Ambroise Vollard’s rue Laffitte gallery in Paris. Though Vollard initially considered the show to be unsuccessful, fifteen works sold and several critics took note of the artist’s ability to absorb and reproduce the intricacies of life, as represented in Village Castillan: “[Picasso] is the painter, utterly and beautifully the painter; he has the power of divining the essence of things...Like all pure painters he adores color for its own sake...He is enamored of all subjects, and every subject is his.” (F. Fagus, "L’invasion Espagnole: Picasso" in La Revue Blanche, July 15, 1901, pp. 464-65).