The Old Guitarist pops into every parent’s head when their child tells them *gulp*...they want to be an artist.

Poor, destitute, and unappreciated. Sadly this is the reality of many musicians, artists and actors alike, and when Picasso painted this in 1903, he was no exception. At only 22 years old, Picasso was penniless and unknown when he channeled his inner artistic angst into this painting.

While most of us identify Picasso as a boisterous, egomaniacal studmuffin, he was not always so self-assured. Picasso created this painting to capture the timeless emotion of suffering, which was pretty much all he did back then. This is Picasso’s most iconic work from his Blue Period, aka, the years he went full emo. This period manifested itself during the emotional backlash from the brutal suicide of a good friend. After learning his friend had shot himself in the head, Picasso’s psychological state went down hill real fast. The once social Casanova retreated into his studio where he fell into a deep depressive stupor. Instead of painting his voluptuous conquests, Picasso fixated on the outcasts of society: beggars, the elderly, and the disabled. While some of his best work came out of this period, at the time, he had an extremely hard time selling them. They were downers! Surely this didn't help boost the already distraught Picasso. Luckily after three years, Picasso was able to bounce back to his chipper old self and moved onto his more cheery phase: the Prozac Period. I mean the Rose Period.

This painting is also homage to the artist El Greco. Picasso felt an intimate fondness for the often-undervalued Renaissance painter. Little did he know though, in just a few years time, he himself would become one of the most famous artists in history, leaving poor Greco in the dust.

I am sure you've seen this painting a million times before, but there is something you may have missed. It's time to bust out your spectacles because there's a hidden image in this painting that few know about. Just above the guitarist’s ear, there is the faint outline of a woman. Her eyes float just above his head and her chin line cuts through the guitarist’s neck. Upon examining the painting with infrared and X-ray scans, the Art Institute discovered that is was a painting of a nude woman breast feeding hidden in the depths of Old Guitarist. It wouldn’t be a Picasso is there wasn’t at least one reference to the female physique now would it?

This painting now lives at The Art Institute of Chicago, which used to be the hipster of the museum world. See, they were collecting Picassos before it was cool. No joke though, when acquired by the museum in 1926, this was the first institution to accession a Picasso into their permanent collection. With no one collecting Picasso’s work at the time, we can only imagine they got a killer deal.