Day 15 Malaga, Spain, The Picasso Museum, trip to the Canary Islands, 27th January 2026

Wow is all I can say. It was amazing to walk our way though the Picasso museum, fairly recently created within the castle walls, it stores hundreds of his works in different rooms, showing off his different ways of creating art. From pencil drawings to oils, sculptures, lithography and everything in between. Picasso is the city’s most

famous son, housing most of his works in the 16th-century Buenavista Palace.

At the age of fifteen, he portrayed his sister in Lola with a Doll (The Artist's Sister) (c. 1896). Rather than a simple portrait, the painting demonstrates Picasso's already sophisticated range as an artist. Lola's high-necked white dress is typical of Spanish society of the late nineteenth century. The Japanese doll hanging on the wall shows that Picasso was already responding to Asian art.

Painted seventy years later, Maternity (1970) might seem to repudiate the artistic traditions of Picasso's youth. Yet, the painting's subject of a woman and child is central to the tradition in Spanish religious art. Moreover, both this painting and the bronze sculpture Child (1960) show that late in life Picasso often returned to the image of a child as a symbol of rejuvenation in life.

Picasso was obsessed with the form of women.