Pablo Picasso

Composition: The Peasants

1906
Oil on canvas
221 × 131.4 cm (87 × 51.7 in)

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Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia · verified July 2026

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FROM THE BARNES FOUNDATION’S CATALOG

Picasso spent the summer of 1906 living in Gósol, a remote town in the Pyrenees Mountains outside of Barcelona. This enormous canvas, begun that summer and later finished in Paris, depicts two barefoot villagers on their way to the market to sell flowers. The picture's spatial ambiguity, where forms begin to overlap and space becomes difficult to read—notice how the man's thighs and bull's body seem to blend together—hints at the cubist style Picasso would begin developing in 1907.

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