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Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga, in the south of Spain, in 1881, and could reportedly draw before he could speak in full sentences. His father was a painter and drawing teacher, and the story in the family was that while Pablo was still a teenager the father handed over his own brushes and gave up painting himself, because the son was already better.

By his early twenties he was in Paris, poor, painting beggars and circus people in the melancholy blues and soft pinks of what we now call his Blue and Rose periods. Then in 1907 he made a large, deliberately ugly picture of five women, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, with faces borrowed from African masks and bodies snapped into flat planes. Working next to the French painter Georges Braque over the following years, he took that idea apart and built Cubism out of it, a way of showing one object from several angles at once.

He almost never stopped. Across 91 years he worked in paint, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics and stage design, and the sheer count of what he left is hard to believe. Estimates run to roughly 50,000 works. In 1937, after German planes bombed the Basque town of Guernica for the Spanish Nationalists, he turned a government commission into a huge grey mural of screaming figures under one bare lightbulb.

When the Germans occupied Paris in the 1940s he stayed on, a famous artist the regime disliked, and kept working quietly through the war. He went on painting into his nineties and died in 1973 at his house in the south of France, still at the easel. Because he threw almost nothing away, sorting out what he owned and had made took his heirs years.