John Mcewen comments on Science and Charity
JOhn Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, has dismissed the childprodigy legends, the most famous of which details Picasso’s father—an art teacher who specialised in pigeon pictures—handing over his brushes to the boy Picasso saying he would never paint again, having seen him dramatically improve one of his pictures.
Picasso was certainly gifted enough for his father to place all his worldly hopes in his artistic success, but it was achieved through energy, ambition and hard work as much as natural talent. The boy was also mature beyond his years; when he entered art school in Barcelona, having just turned 15, he took Rosita del Oro, six years his senior and star of an equestrian circus, for his first mistress.
Picasso’s father, Jose, was a man of leisure without the means, who didn’t marry until he was 42 and continued to depend on the generosity and contacts of his industrious brothers, especially salvador, a pious and much-respected doctor. art-teaching posts took the family from sleepy southern Málaga, via Corunna, to bustling Barcelona, capital of Catalonia and the industrial north, where they arrived in 1895.
Picasso loved Barcelona and considered it his ‘birthplace’. To please his father, who found him a studio and gave him a large stretched canvas as a house-warming present, he painted Science and Charity. The subject honoured devout uncle salvador, although the model was his father and he couldn’t bring himself to paint the customary crucifix over the bed. his father gave the picture its grand title and entered it for a national exhibition in Madrid, where it was officially commended, and in Málaga, where it won a gold medal.