Museu Picasso ★★

Studies from "Las Meninas" by Pablo Picasso in Barcelona's Museu Picasso. (Photo by Ivan Lian)

The greatest Picasso museum outside of Paris, filled with his early works, is in Barcelona

Picasso's Science and Charity (1897) painted at age 16.Although born in Andalusia, Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) moved to Barcelona at age 14, and it was here, in the academy where his father taught, that he learned his craft.

Barcelona was lucky enough soon after opening this museum to secure—from the master himself, who donated them to the museum—a collection of 921 paintings, many of them his earliest works, which his mother, sister, and nephew had preserved.

The very first room disproves the old tongue-in-cheek myth that Picasso invented Cubism merely because he couldn't draw properly.

One of Picasso's Las Meninas studies (1957).Here you'll see remarkable drawings and paintings executed in a classical style with a high degree of realism—all when Picasso was a young teenager.

Other paintings show how Picasso also studied and dabbled with Impressionism and his fellow post-Impressionists, with works clearly inspired by Manet, Courbet, and Cezanne.

Not that there aren't also plenty of the more familiar Cubist works. Of the other 4,249 works in this collection, seek out his series of Cubist takes—58 paintings and drawings—based on his studies of Las Meninas, Velázquez's masterpiece in Madrid's Prado museum.

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