The Old Guitarist, 1903 Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Location: Art Institute of Chicago Illinois USAOriginal Size: 123 x 82.6 cm


A Glimpse into Our Studio: Creating Museum-Quality Oil Painting Reproductions
Watch a video showcasing the creation of a hand-painted reproduction of The Old Guitarist by Picasso in our TOPofART studio. Witness the step-by-step process as our artists bring this masterpiece to life.
Oil Painting Reproduction
If you want a different size than the offered
Description
Painted by European Аrtists with Academic Education
Museum Quality
+ 4 cm (1.6") Margins for Stretching
Creation Time: 8-9 Weeks
Creation Process
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.
Delivery
Once the painting The Old Guitarist 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.
After adding your artwork to the shopping cart, you will be able to check the delivery price using the Estimate Shipping and Tax tool.
Museum Quality
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.
Additional Information
Picasso’s chromatic restraint is uncompromising: cobalt, indigo, and Prussian blues dominate, relieved only by the muted umber of the guitar and an occasional vein of pallid white. The effect is at once cool and immersive, the eye drifting through gradations of night-time hues that evoke damp air and sombre silence. That single warm plane of brown becomes the painting’s pulse; its contrast is not decorative but psychological, the guitar’s timbre imagined rather than heard.
Painted thinly in oil on a reused panel, the surface permits faint under-drawing to emerge, lending the picture a spectral quality. Brushstrokes are economical, flattened, and often parallel, locking forms into place rather than modelling them. Edges blur where the pigment thins, producing a kind of atmospheric haze that suspends the figure between corporeality and apparition. This sparseness of means serves the subject, articulating poverty without anecdote.
Compositionally, the picture turns on two diagonals: the long neck of the guitar rising to the right, and the bent spine of the musician descending to the left, meeting at the instrument’s sound hole. This cruciform interplay stabilises an otherwise precarious posture, guiding the viewer’s gaze from head to hands to the instrument. The elongated limbs and attenuated head recall El Greco, whose Spanish mannerism Picasso admired; here those proportions are stripped of mysticism and grounded in hardship.
Created in Barcelona during the Blue Period, the work resonates with contemporary Symbolist explorations of alienation while remaining distinctly personal. At twenty-two Picasso inhabited the margins of the city, acquainted with hunger, illness, and loss. His affinity for the downtrodden is neither sentimental nor rhetorical: the painting asks the viewer to share a moment of fragile dignity, filtered through a tonal language that broods on humanity’s quiet endurance.