The Museu Picasso is a museum of Picasso's beginnings and of his old age, and it holds almost no Cubism. What it has instead is the work from either end of his life: the schoolboy paintings he made after arriving in Barcelona at thirteen, when his father started teaching at the Llotja art school, and the work of the old man in Cannes who kept reworking a single painting by Velázquez. In between come the Blue Period rooftops and the drawings of a teenager who was already showing his work in old-town cafés. The whole collection arrived as gifts. Jaume Sabartés, a friend from those Barcelona years who became his secretary, gave the first part of it, and in 1970 Picasso handed over everything his family had kept in their flat in the city, down to schoolbooks scribbled in the margins.
The route threads through five adjoining medieval palaces on Carrer Montcada, once the address of the city's merchant families, so you cross stone courtyards and climb open staircases between galleries. The rooms are small and the pictures hang in the order they were painted, so within two doorways you pass from polished academy canvases to the loosened blue paintings that came next. It ends in a long room hung with the whole Las Meninas series, made sixty years after the earliest pictures here. The street outside stays narrow and busy; inside, the galleries fill in the middle of the day.