Pablo Picasso | Sleeping peasants, 1919

Sleeping peasants, is the most potent of the small erotic paintings that is brilliantly coloured.

The restless, irregular rhythms mapped out by the contours of the tumescene limbs and ruckled drapery amount to a graph of love-making which has just occured, while the woman's thrown-back head and uncovered breast confirm her maenadic ancestry.

The ripe bodies nestled in the ripe crops implying some archaic fertility rite.

Medium: Gouache, watercolor, and pencil on paper

Dimensions: 12 1/4 x 19 1/4" (31.1 x 48.9 cm)

Credit: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund

Current location: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

The painting is carefully planned and controlled, and in that sense an Apolline work of art, and makes its share of erudite allusions to the classical tradition: to the Antique (the pedimental sculptures of the Parthenon), the Renaissance (the massive, straining figures of Michelangelo) and modernist classicism (the late Arcadian scenes of Cezanne).

Here the ostensible mood is reflective and 'serene'. | Source: pablopicasso

Pablo Picasso | The Siesta, 1932 | Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz Picasso para el Arte

• "I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else".

• "I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money".

• "All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up".

• "Youth has no age".

• "He can who thinks he can, and he can't who thinks he can't. This is an inexorable, indisputable law".

• "I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents".

• "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child".

• "It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction".

• "Every act of creation is first an act of destruction".

• "I do not seek. I find".

• "There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality".

• "I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them".

• "Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth".

• "Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs".

• "Bad artists copy. Good artists steal".

• "Everything you can imagine is real".

• "It takes a long time to become young".

• "Art is the elimination of the unnecessary".

• "Action is the foundational key to all success".

• "All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up".

• "An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought".

• "Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs".