 My name is Nancy Eisen. I'm the Gun Family Chief Curator at the Bounds Foundation. Now you're with me in my apartment today because the Bounds Foundation is closed, like most places. But I wanted to share with you a picture which I really love because it reminds me of travel and I'm sure that most of us at the moment are really missing that. It's a painting that Picasso made in 1906 and it's in Gallery 1 of the Foundation. It's one of the first things that you see. Really, this is one of the most spectacular places in the gallery. And I want to focus right in on a canvas which you just get a glimpse of to your right. So here we have it. Now this is a work that Picasso made just after he'd been on vacation. He went to a little mountain town called Gossel, and really this was quite a special trip. Picasso had been born in Malaga in 1881, so he was Spanish. And by this time he had settled in Paris, which was a great city if you're an artist. Now in Paris he lived in a set of studios called the Bateau Levoir, which translates as the Laundry Boat. It was a very funny building in the district of Montmartre and lots of artists lived there, lots of writers too. And one of the figures that he met there was a woman called Fernand Olivier. The two of them met in 1904 and they became lovers. And really by this time they're in quite a serious relationship. This is 1906 and Picasso decides to take Fernand Olivier to Spain. The two of them end up in Barcelona, which Picasso knows well. And from there they take a train to Gossel. I say that they took a train, but really it wasn't quite that simple. You had to take a train, but then you had to take a mule ride. Fernand Olivier, who was very much a city girl, describes in her memoirs an eight hour mule ride to get to this place. And really she wasn't prepared to be enchanted by it and yet she ended up being. It was really a wonderful place to be. Gossel is still a very small mountain town. It actually has less people living in it now than it did when Picasso went there. In 1906 it had less than a thousand inhabitants and it had one in. And that's where Picasso and Fernand Olivier stayed. And Fernand Olivier just remembers that Picasso was enchanted by what he saw by a rural way of life, by the fact that he could speak Catalan. He was a Spanish speaker, but he knew some Catalan and he had a chance to practice it. And he was also interested in this period in Iberian art, so ancient Mediterranean art. And all of this seems to be at work in this painting, which he probably made once they got back to Paris. I want to focus in on a few details of the picture, so let's just go in close here. The first that I want to draw your attention to is the female figure. Now, like most of the women that appear in Picasso's pictures at this time, this woman is loosely based on Fernand Olivier. Now I say loosely based because we know that Fernand Olivier had urban hair and she had green eyes. And as you can see quite clearly what we have here is a woman with tightly coiled black hair and very, very stylized features. Another thing that I'd like to show you is the way in which Picasso paints the flowers at the top of the canvas. And really here I think it's a reminder of why Picasso had come to Paris. He knew the Impressionist painters, he knew the work of Renoir and Monet. And here you get a sense of that influence coming through the little flashes of color, this very free and vibrant brushwork. And really it's such a beautiful part of the image, just such an abundance of color. Now there's quite a contrast in the handling of that part of the picture. And if you like the main focus of the image, this very sturdy male figure. Now here I think in a way you get a sense that there's a real monumentality to this body. You look at that crisp white shirt and you see how much Picasso seems to have enjoyed creating the contours of the fabric. Very audacious stripes of white paint there and really just these angles that give you a sense of folds of cotton or linen. And for me this is a reminder that just a few years after he made this painting, Picasso along with his friend Georges Braque would be inventing a new style of painting that we know is cubism. In a Cuba's picture you get a sense of what an object is like in three dimensions. So if you think about the memories that we might have of our holidays or our vacations, it isn't just something that's flat and still that looks like a person or a place. It's actually a whole host of memories of things seen from all angles, of things experienced from all angles. And here I think you get a sense of fabric billowing of the way in which a sleeve might have been rolled up and the way in which these actions create reactions. There's also a wonderful sense of colour contrast in this painting. And I want to draw your attention here to this brilliant gold colour just behind the head of the oxen and the blue and pink, if you like, of the sky. This is very much a painting that creates feelings and associations. It isn't a literal landscape. And that becomes very, very apparent when you become focused on the foot of the canvas there. This shadow that the oxen casts is just a patch of red. And again, this reminds us that Picasso had known many 19th-century styles. Artists like Gauguin, who you can see in the Barnes Foundation, were also using these methods to create a different kind of painting that was unashamed of the fact that the painting is something that isn't enslaved to representation. So, as you're stuck at home and thinking about where you might like to go next, I hope that talking about Picasso's 1906 painting, The Peasants, has given you some nice memories of your own trips and perhaps some inspiration of where to go next. You never know. Please do tune in again. There'll be more Barnes Takeout tomorrow. Thank you very much.