Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian
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the Castilian laugh. In time the Moors and the Jews were more or less efficiently expelled or forcibly converted, and eventually many of the descendants of these converts, the “new Christians,” were also driven from the country; but they left their genes behind, and many of their ways—their attitude towards women, for example. Then again there is a fierce democratic independence combined with an ability to live under a despotic regime that is reminiscent of the egalitarianism of Islam: no one could call the Spaniards as a whole a deferential nation, but this characteristic grows even more marked as one travels south, to reach its height in Andalucía. And as one travels south, so the physical evidence of these genes becomes more apparent; the Arab, the Berber, and the Jew peep out, to say nothing of the Phoenician; and the Castilian or the Catalan is apt to lump the Andalou in with the Gypsies, a great many of whom live in those parts. For the solid bourgeois of Madrid or Barcelona the Andalou is something of an outsider; he is held in low esteem, as being wanting in gravity, assiduity, and respect for the establishment. Málaga itself had a solid reputation for being against the government, for being impatient of authority: it was a contentious city, in spite of its conforming bourgeoisie. In the very square in which Picasso was born there is a monument to a general and forty-nine of his companions, including a Mr. Robert Boyd, who rose in favor of the Constitution and who were all shot in Málaga in 1831 and buried in the square; it also commemorates the hero of another rising, Riego, after whom the square was officially named, although it has now reverted to its traditional name of the Plaza de la Merced, from the church of Nuestra Señora de la Merced, which used to stand in its north-east corner. There were many other risings, insurrections, and pronunciamientos in Málaga during the nineteenth century, including one against Espartero in 1843, another against Queen Isabella II in 1868 (this, of course, was part of the greater turmoil of the Revolution), and another in favor of a republic only eight years before Picasso’s birth. But although many of these risings, both in Málaga and the rest of Spain, had a strongly anticlerical element, with churches and monasteries going up in flames and monks, nuns, friars, and even hermits being expelled and dispossessed, the Spaniards remained profoundly Catholic, and the Malagueños continued to live their traditional religious life, celebrating the major feasts of the Church with splendid bull-fights, making pilgrimages to local shrines, forming great processions in Holy Week, hating what few heretics they ever saw (until 1830 Protestants had to be buried on the foreshore, where heavy seas sometimes disinterred them), and of course baptizing their children. It would have been unthinkable for Picasso not to have been christened, and sixteen days after his birth he was taken to the parish church of Santiago el Mayor (whose tower was once a minaret), where the priest of La Merced gave him the names Pablo, Diego, José, Francisco de Paula, Juan Nepomuceno, María de los Remedios, and Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad, together with some salt to expel the devil.
In most countries this array of names would imply an exalted origin: but not in Andalucía. The Ruiz family belonged to that traditionally almost non-existent body, the Spanish middle class. José Ruiz y Blasco, Picasso’s father, was the son of Diego Ruiz y de Almoguera, a glover and by all accounts an amiable and gifted man with artistic tastes, a great talker; but in that subtropical climate there was no fortune in gloves, and Don Diego also played the double-bass in the orchestra of the municipal theater. This Diego Ruiz was born in Córdoba in 1799, well before Goya painted the “Tres de Mayo,” and he remembered the French occupation of Málaga very well indeed (his father, José Ruiz y de Fuentes had removed there during the Peninsular War), for not only did the French sack the city in 1810, but they also beat the young Diego for throwing stones at them. It is said that they beat him almost to death, for it was during a general’s parade that he threw his stones: however that may be, he recovered sufficiently to set up shop in due time, to marry María de la Paz Blasco y Echevarria, and to have eleven children by her. It is the Spanish custom to use two surnames on formal occasions, one’s father’s and one’s mother’s, often connected with a y, but to hand down only the paternal half: thus Diego’s son José was called Ruiz y Blasco, both the Almoguera and the Echevarria disappearing. Echevarria, by the way, is a name that has a Basque sound about it, and this may account for the often-repeated statement that Picasso’s father was of Basque origin. Then again a Spanish woman retains her patronymic on marrying and adds to it her husband’s, preceded by de, so that Diego’s wife was known as Señora Blasco de Ruiz.
As for origins, it has been attempted to be shown that the Ruiz family descended from one Juan de León, a hidalgo of immemorial nobility who had estates at Cogolludo in the kingdom of León and who was killed in 1487 during the war for the reconquest of Granada: his grandson settled at Villafranca de Córdoba; and he is said to be the ancestor of the Ruizes. It may be so; but the sudden and irregular appearance of the name Ruiz is not particularly convincing, even taking into account the strange anarchy of Spanish family names at that period. In any event this remote Leonese origin is scarcely relevant: for although, as Gibbon says, “we wish to discover our ancestors, but we wish to discover them possessed of ample fortunes, and holding an eminent rank in the class of hereditary nobles,” and although we sometimes succeed, the practical effect of the more or less mythical Don Juan on the Ruizes cannot have been very great four centuries and eleven generations later; nor can that of the Venerable Juan de Almoguera, Archbishop of Lima, Viceroy and Captain-General of Peru in the seventeenth century, who is stated to have been a collateral.
In more recent and verifiable times, however, there was another Juan de Almoguera, a Córdoban and a notary, who died in deeply embarrassed circumstances at Almodóvar del Río, leaving a widow and eleven children, the eldest of whom, María Josefa, married José Ruiz y de Fuentes, Picasso’s great-grandfather, while the tenth, Pedro Dionisio, became a hermit. He joined the Venerable Congregación de Ermitaños de Nuestra Señora de Belén in the mountains of Córdoba in 1792 and became their superior some twenty years later; his health was always poor and he could not always remain in his hermitage; nevertheless he nursed the sick most devotedly during the cholera epidemic of 1834. And when his community was suppressed, expropriated, and expelled at the time of the anticlerical outburst of 1835 he managed to retain a little of their land, a spot from which he could look out over the mountains. He died in 1856, at the age of eighty-one, and he left a vividly living memory: his great-grand-nephew Pablo often spoke of “Tío Perico, who led an exemplary life as a hermit in the Sierra de Córdoba.”*
The most diligent research has discovered little reliable information about Picasso’s maternal ancestors: they seem to have been obscure burgesses of Málaga for some generations; but Picasso’s maternal grandmother at least was tolerably well provided for, since she owned vineyards outside the town that supported her and her daughters until the phylloxera destroyed them. Her husband, Francisco Picasso y Guardeño, went to school in England, 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