In 1905, Pablo Picasso visited the studio of Spanish painter Ignacio Zuloaga. He was so intrigued by what he saw there that he returned time and again over the next two years until he finally produced the piece that his trips had inspired.
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was the first Picasso that radically departed from a traditional style and set the stage for the creation of the Cubist movement.
But it wasn’t the Spanish artist’s work that had caught the budding Cubist’s eye. Zuloaga liked to surround himself with the art of his idols, and the white walls of his studio were covered “with canvases which he prizes above all else in the world, all saving his wife, his daughter Lucia and son Antonio,” according to a 1917 article in the Fine Arts Journal.