returned to his native Málaga, married Inés Lopez y Robles, had four daughters by her, and went off to Cuba: there he became a customs-officer and eventually died of the yellow fever, in 1883, the news taking some fifteen years to reach his family. The origin of the name Picasso, which is most unusual in Spain (the double s does not occur in Castilian), has resisted all inquiries: some writers have pointed to Italy and particularly to the Genoese painter Mateo Picasso, a nineteenth-century portraitist, and Pablo Picasso himself went so far as to buy one of his pictures. On the other hand, Jaime Sabartés, one of Picasso’s oldest friends, his biographer, secretary, and factotum, discovered a Moorish prince called Picaço, who came to Spain with eight thousand horsemen and who was defeated and slain in battle by the Grand Master of Alcántara on Tuesday, October 28, 1339. And there have been assertions of a Jewish, Balearic, or Catalan origin. These are not of the least consequence, however; the real significance of this unusual, striking name is that it had at least some influence in setting its owner slightly apart, of making him feel that he was not quite the same as other people—a feeling that was to be reinforced by several other factors quite apart from that isolating genius which soon made it almost impossible for him to find any equals.
To return to Diego Ruiz, the glover, Picasso’s paternal grandfather: in spite of his beating at the hands of the French soldiers, in spite of the near anarchy that prevailed in Spain almost without a pause from 1800 to 1874 (to speak only of the nineteenth century), in spite of the risings for or against the various constitutions, of the Carlist wars, the pronunciamientos, the continual (and often bloody) struggles between the conservatives, the moderados, and the liberals, in spite of the mutinous political generals, the loss of the South American possessions, the stagnation of trade, and the tottering national finances, Diego Ruiz, like so many of his relatives in Málaga, had an enormous family, four boys and seven girls.
The second of these boys, Pablo, had a vocation that must have rejoiced all his relatives: he entered the Church and did remarkably well, becoming a doctor of theology and eventually, although he had no gift for preaching, a canon of Málaga cathedral and his family’s main prop and stay.
The profession chosen by Salvador, the youngest boy, cannot have caused anything like the same satisfaction: he decided to study medicine at Granada, and at that time neither medicine nor medical men were much esteemed in Spain. Richard Ford, writing only a few years before Don Salvador began his studies, speaks of the “base bloody and brutal Sangrados,” observing that in all Sevilla only one doctor was admitted into good company, “and every stranger was informed apologetically that the MD was de casa conocida, or born of good family.” In Granada Don Salvador met a young woman, Concepción Marin, the daughter of a sculptor; and being unwilling to part from her he took a post at the hospital when he was qualified, at a salary of 750 pesetas a year. But although Spain was then a relatively cheap country he found that this sum, which at that time represented about $112, or £28, did not allow him to put by enough to marry and set up house; he returned to Málaga, practiced (the Reverend Dr. Pablo was useful to him and his patients included the French Assumptionist nuns and their schoolgirls as well as the convent of Franciscans, whom he did not charge), prospered, and in 1876, seven years after he had qualified, he married Concepción, who gave him two daughters, Picasso’s cousins Concha and María. Later Don Salvador became the medical officer of the port and he also founded the Málaga Vaccination Institute. He was a kind man and a brave one (in the anticlerical troubles he protected the nuns at the risk of his life), and from the financial point of view he did better than any Ruiz in Andalucía: it was as a successful, cigar-smoking physician that he attended Picasso’s birth, reanimating his limp and apparently stillborn nephew with a blast of smoke into his infant lungs. Later he also contributed to the support of young Pablo in Madrid and to the buying of his exemption when the time came for his military service.
But if Don Salvador’s choice of a calling met with certain reserves at first, his brother José’s can have caused nothing but dismay. Having some skill in drawing, a knack for illustration, he determined to become an artist, a painter; and for some years he persisted in this course. He acquired a fair academic technique; he had a craftsman’s talent and an ability to use his tools; but he had nothing whatsoever to say in terms of paint, or at least he never said it. He produced a large number of painstaking decorative pictures of dead game, flowers (particularly lilacs), and above all of live pigeons, a few of which he sold; and he painted fans. He lived with his elder brother, the Canon, who also supported his surviving unmarried sisters, Josefa and Matilde.
It is the sad fate of towns that have once been capital cities (and at one time Málaga was the seat of an independent Moorish king) that when they lose this status they become more provincial than those which never emerged from obscurity. Málaga was deeply provincial. Yet it did possess a struggling art-school, the Escuela de Artes y Oficios de San Telmo, which had been founded in 1849; and in 1868 the quite well known Valencian artist Bernardo Ferrándiz became its professor of painting and composition. He was followed by Antonio Muñoz Degrain, another Valencian (they had come to Málaga to decorate the Teatro Cervantes); and the presence of these two painters of more than local fame, more than common talent, coincided with a revival of interest in the arts—a small and temporary revival, perhaps, but enough to induce the municipality to set up a museum of fine arts on the second floor of the expropriated Augustinian monastery which they used as the town hall. José Ruiz succeeded his friend Muñoz Degrain at San Telmo and he was also appointed the first curator of the museum. His duties included the restoring of the damaged pictures, a task for which his meticulous craftsmanship and attention to detail suited him admirably: what is more, he had a room set aside for this work, and as the museum followed the ancient Spanish provincial tradition of being almost always shut, he did his own painting there as well.
It was a fairly agreeable life; he had a small but apparently assured income, and any paintings that he sold added jam to his bread and butter; he had many friends of a mildly bohemian character, some of them painters; and he delighted in the bull-fights, better conducted, better understood in Andalucía than anywhere else in the world: at all events it was the happiest life he ever knew.
But his youth was passing—indeed, it had passed: he was nearly forty—and his family urged him to marry. None of his brothers or sisters had yet produced a son, and the family name was in danger of extinction. They arranged a suitable marriage for him, and although he could not be brought to like the young woman of their choice he did make an offer to her cousin María—María Picasso y Lopez. Yet before the marriage could take place the Canon died: this was in 1878, and he was only forty-seven. His loss was felt most severely; and either because of this or because Don José felt little real enthusiasm for marriage, the wedding was not celebrated until 1880.
José Ruiz took a flat in the Plaza de la Merced, on the third floor of a double terrace recently built by a wealthy man, Don Antonio Campos Garvin, Marqués de Ignato, on the site of a former convent. Don José was now responsible for a wife, two unmarried sisters, a mother-in-law and, after 1881, a son. Then, in 1884, during a violent earthquake, a daughter appeared: three years later another: at some point María de Ruiz’s unmarried sisters Eladia and Heliodora, whose vineyards had been ravaged by the phylloxera, moved in. And in the meantime the municipality decided to abolish not the museum, but the curator: or at least the curator’s salary. Don José offered to serve in an honorary capacity; and as he had hoped a newly-elected council eventually gave him back his pay.
But these continual difficulties, the daily worry, overcame a man quite unsuited to cope with them: there was little that he could do, apart from offering to pay his rent with pictures, giving private lessons, and selling an occasional canvas. Fortunately his landlord was a lover of the arts, as they were understood in Málaga in the 1880s; or at least he liked the company of artists, and he accepted a large number of José Ruiz’s paintings. Several were found in his descendants’ possession some years ago; but it was thought kinder not to exhibit them.
Don José’s worries were real enough in all their sad banality, and many, many people can sympathize with them from experience; but there was also a factor that perhaps only another artist can fully appreciate
