Musee Picasso, Paris

It can't be often that a single artist has a museum dedicated to his works. Yet such was the quantity of output that the legendary Spanish artist Pablo Picasso created during his long life that even the Musee Picasso only contains a fraction of his "oeuvre".

The number of works in the Musee Picasso by Picasso amounts to more than 3000 and spans paintings, drawings and ceramics. It is also backed up by works of art from his personal collection by other artists, such as Matisse, Cezanne and Degas.

The Hotel Sale, built in the seventeenth century in the fashionable Marais district of Paris, where the Musee Picasso is housed, is already a three-storey building.

However, to display the entire "oeuvre" of Picasso would in theory require an extra-large building. Picasso demonstrated extreme productivity, and the total number of works attributed to him comes to 50,000, including 1800 paintings, 1200 sculptures, 2800 ceramics, 12000 drawings and many prints, rugs and tapestries.

Born in 1881, Picasso lived to be over 90 and had taken to art from the age of seven. His mother reported that his first words were "piz piz", referring to "lapiz", the Spanish word for pencil. His father was Professor of Fine Arts in Spain and no doubt nurtured young Pablo during his childhood. Picasso moved to Paris first in 1900 and lived there for much of his life.

Picasso was still painting and drawing up until his death. Meanwhile, his most famous works "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907) and "Guernica" (1937) belong to different periods in his career.

Visitors to the Musee Picasso can see the breadth of the artist's career as everything is displayed in chronological order. At the start is a self portrait from 1901. At the end is "The Old Man Seated", painted in 1971 a couple of years before his death. The collection at the Musee Picasso contains a large number of works created after Picasso was 70.

One wonders if Picasso lived in a big house himself, as he collected many of his own works that he didn't need to sell. Because he left no will, the Musee Picasso represents the tax that was due to the French state, which is why we have this museum today, founded in 1985 from Picasso's personal collection.