Soler was a key and indispensable figure in the life of a then-poor and unknown twenty-something painter named Pablo Picasso. During Picasso’s stay in Barcelona, thanks to Soler’s help—who provided him shelter and food—the artist would paint the most important work of his so-called Blue Period. This work features the tailor’s family as its central subject and was created amid severe and persistent financial hardship, a situation Picasso managed to overcome thanks to his tailor friend.
In Barcelona, during the summer of 1903, a young Pablo Picasso spent his afternoons portraying the family who, at that time, offered him lodging, protection, and meals: the family of the tailor Soler. Through luminous brushstrokes, he developed an original idea—a triptych presenting a serene, rural, almost bucolic scene in which the protagonists enjoy a family picnic. Confident in his talent, the young painter sensed that his work might hold value in the future, allowing him to compensate his benefactor for his support. What he likely did not imagine was that he was creating the work that would embody the essence of his Blue Period (1901–1904), a time marked by melancholy, sadness, financial scarcity, and the search for his artistic identity.
The Soler Family, also known as Le Déjeuner sur…, is an oil on canvas (150 × 200 cm) located at the heart of Picasso’s Blue Period. Its particularity, later dispersed across three European museums, is that it is a triptych: three paintings connected by a unified meaning yet individual in composition, forming a masterwork. The triptych features the members of the tailor Soler’s family, made up of a central panel and two lateral ones devoted respectively to Mr. and Mrs. Soler.
Art in Exchange for Fine Waistcoats
The tailor Benet Soler Vidal (1874–1945) was a member of the petite bourgeoisie who lived comfortably and enjoyed simple pleasures in early 20th-century Barcelona. Nicknamed Retalls (“scraps”), he was a close friend and the great benefactor of the young, idealistic, and impoverished Picasso, who carried within him the dream of becoming the greatest painter of the century. Soler was a cultured and prosperous tailor who enjoyed being regarded as a patron of artists and aspiring writers. He was highly respected within the intellectual and artistic circles of Barcelona, particularly in the local brewery where the modernist group Picasso frequented met at sundown—a space where avant-garde ideas, debates, and prints circulated with the accelerated pace of the times, in a world divided between capitalism and communism.
Soler’s tailor shop was located in a distinguished, prosperous area of the city, on Barcelona’s legendary Portal de l’Àngel Avenue, notable for its Parisian character, with streetlamps, cobblestones, and art-nouveau buildings with their typical attic rooms. There, the young Picasso often exchanged paintings for elegant garments—a fair agreement in his view, since dressing well was essential for making a good impression in the bohemian avant-garde world and for facing difficult times with optimism. This steady exchange led Soler to become one of the Catalans who accumulated the most Picasso works. The unfortunate side of this story is that Soler’s generosity was not accompanied by artistic foresight; encouraged by his wife, he systematically disposed of many of the pieces in the years that followed.
The young Picasso portrayed the Soler family with great skill—a family he came to cherish deeply. The work depicts the tailor Soler, his wife Doña Montserrat, and their four children—Antoñita, Mercè, Carles, and Montserrat—along with the family dog. The painting was sold by the couple in 1913 to the German dealer Kahnweiler. It was later acquired by the Cologne Museum in Germany. Today, the most significant painting of the Blue Period, The Soler Family, belongs to the Musée d’Art Moderne de Liège in Belgium, where it can be viewed and enjoyed by the public.
