El Juicio de Paris

Simonet finished this enormous Judgement of Paris in 1904, more than three metres tall, a full-blown academic showpiece of the old kind. Three goddesses stand mostly with their backs to us while the shepherd Paris, seated at the right with the winged boy Eros beside him, decides which of them should get the golden apple. It is a subject and a manner that the art world of 1904 was already leaving behind for Cezanne and the young. One of those young painters came from Simonet's own city of Malaga, Pablo Picasso, by then in France and pulling art the opposite way. The canvas hangs today in Malaga, where both men were born.