Three Musicians, 1921 Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Pablo Picasso also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Three Musicians is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

We offer free shipping as well as paid express transportation services.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

The eye is first met by a tightly knit triad of performers, each rendered as if cut from coloured card and assembled into a shallow stage-box. On the left sits a pale-faced Pierrot, mask hovering over a blue torso, fingers clasping a clarinet whose grey barrel punctuates the vertical. Opposite, a tonsured, near-somnambulant monk mouths lyrics, sheet music spread across bunched knees. Between them, the Harlequin - his chequered limbs a lattice of orange, yellow and green - strums a guitar whose golden flank glows like a candle in the dusk. Beneath the table an almost phantom dog stretches, its silhouette sliced into the same planar idiom that governs the room, its tail a jaunty flick anchoring the composition’s lower centre. The surrounding architecture is skeletal: two parallel brown uprights and a ceiling bar evoke a proscenium, turning the interior into a theatre of forms.

Picasso orchestrates colour with the acuity of a composer balancing dissonance and harmony. Dominant ochres, umbers and blacks provide a sonorous ground, while patches of ultramarine ignite the recesses of jacket, trouser and table shadow. Against this sombre field the pale masks, the parchment-like whites of music sheets and Pierrot’s leg, and the bright cadmium yellows of guitar and collar flare into relief. The palette thus modulates between earth and jewel, encouraging the eye to pulse inward toward the luminous centre before drifting outward to the enveloping penumbra. It is a chromatic choreography that tempers the ludic with the elegiac, suffusing the scene with an undertow of stillness despite its subject of performance.

Technique here is a masterclass in Synthetic Cubism’s sleight of hand. Though oil on canvas, the painting mimics pasted paper: edges are clean, tonality unmodelled, surfaces matte and opaque. The brushwork is all but effaced, so that colour reads as substance rather than paint. Yet within these ostensibly flat planes, Picasso insinuates depth by overlapping shards, letting a clarinet mouthpiece jut over a guitar curve, or a sleeve tuck behind a tabletop. The illusion is of a collage disassembling itself in slow motion - a meditation on the act of construction, on the painter’s doubleness as both artisan and trickster.

Compositionally, the work locks into a tight rhomboid, the trio forming a single monumental block whose apex aligns with the Harlequin’s dark cap. Diagonals from instrument necks and dog’s tail cut across verticals, preventing rigidity while sustaining coherence. Negative spaces - the dark triangles beside Pierrot’s elbow or beneath the music stand - pulse like silent rests in a score, crucial to the rhythm of looking. The viewer’s gaze is guided from the bright guitar to the monk’s pale chant, down to the score’s jagged notations, and finally to the dog’s barely discerned muzzle, a comic afterthought that arrives as a delayed punch-line.

Painted in 1921, the canvas stands at a crossroads between post-war introspection and a rediscovery of theatrical archetype. The commedia dell’arte figures had long interested Picasso, yet here their masking acquires an added gravitas, perhaps coloured by recent losses among his circle. Contemporary readings have linked the three musicians to the artist himself and poet-friends already gone or soon to retreat from worldly life - an interpretation lent weight by the monk’s withdrawn mien and the Pierrot’s hollow stare. Music, far from a celebration, becomes a metaphor for camaraderie sustained through art when ordinary ties fray. Thus the picture’s playful façade cloaks an inquiry into presence and absence, performance and memory, holding its contradictions in a poised and resonant equilibrium.