Famiglia di saltimbanchi

This is the biggest and most worked-over painting of Picasso's Rose Period, close to seven feet on each side. He built it up over roughly nine months in 1905, and X-rays have found two whole earlier pictures underneath, a circus family and then a pair of acrobats, painted out as he kept changing his mind. On top he left six travelling performers standing in an empty pinkish plain, going nowhere in particular. Picasso was watching real acrobats at the Cirque Medrano in Montmartre at the time, and, poor and Spanish and unknown in Paris, he saw these wandering saltimbanques as a kind of family of outcast artists like himself. The tall harlequin at the left is often taken for the painter.