With remarkable power he has refertilised many extinct modes, and authenticated interesting new and specifically scientific notions. He has given El Greco a new bit of life on the Catalan hills in his painting of Spanish shepherds, oxherds and vagrants. He has revivified a great artist’s line there, another’s colour combinations here, and has played the skilfulest variations. Since every great creative painter must at the same time have great executive ability--the more dexterity he can command the better--it is always difficult to decide where this hand-training does or should leave off, and where imaginative invention, apart from the delights and triumphs of execution, may or does begin. Briefly, Picasso’s periods are as follows. His earliest work contained a variety of experiments: women sitting in cafés in reds; Daumier-like scenes, but more fragile and rather definitely sentimentalised; then a painting of a poor family standing by the side of a languid and mournful bit of sea, their bones appearing through their clothes, their faces romantically haggard and delicate, and a general air of Maeterlinck or some modern German “poet-painter” all over it, has been widely reproduced. (Title: “Pauvres au bord de la Mer.”) Then came a period during which Dérain’s Gauguinism appealed to him. El Greco was a still more prolonged infatuation and source of study. Then Cézanne arrived in his painting. The portraits of Miss Stein and of Monsieur Sagot are of that time. African carvings supplied the next step, in conjunction with the Marquesas Islands and André Dérain. These solid and static models, African, Polynesian, Aix, drove out the Grecos, Maeterlincks and Puvises. Braque appears to have been the innovator in Cubism; and obviously in Braquism--the brown brand of mandoline, man’s eye and bottle; lately, through Picasso’s gayer agency, taking on brighter and purer colours. Futurism once more gave this Wandering Jew from not far from the Sierras a further marching order. Off his talent leapt into little gimcrack contrivances--_natures mortes_, in fact, come out of the canvas; little pieces of _nature-morte_ sculpture, nature as the artist sees her, in fact; the bottle, mandoline and copy of _La Presse_ reappearing out of art transfigured, after passing first through the artist’s eye, spending a bit of time in the busy workshop of his brain, and so abiding for a year or so, into the flat world of the artist’s canvas. After this series of hairbreadth adventures it is natural that this docile collection of objects should no longer remind the casual observer of any category of objects known to him.