Museu Picasso

The Museu Picasso tells a story no other Picasso museum can: how a precociously gifted teenager became the artist who reinvented painting. Pablo Picasso moved to Barcelona with his family in 1895, aged thirteen, when his father took a teaching post at the city's art school, and the city shaped him — its art school, its cafés, its bohemian circle at Els Quatre Gats, where he held his first exhibition, and its streets, which supplied the beggars and outcasts of the Blue Period. The museum opened in 1963, built on the collection of Picasso's lifelong friend and secretary Jaume Sabartés, and Picasso himself later gave it a vast gift of early work kept by his family. The result is an unmatched record of the early years: childhood sketchbooks, astonishingly assured academic studies, and large canvases such as Science and Charity, painted when he was about fifteen, which would make a mature painter proud. Then the style starts to move — Paris influences, the melancholy blues of the early 1900s, and the Rose Period. The second great strength is a late-career masterpiece cycle: in 1957 Picasso spent months reworking Velázquez's Las Meninas in fifty-eight paintings, and he donated the entire series to the museum, where it fills a suite of rooms and shows him dismantling and rebuilding a single picture from every possible angle. Do not expect Guernica (it is in Madrid) or a full survey of the cubist years; come for the origin story. The setting is a joy too, a row of Gothic palaces with stone courtyards and staircases on one of the old city's grandest medieval streets.

The building itself is part of the experience. Carrer Montcada was the address of choice for Barcelona's merchant aristocracy in the late Middle Ages, and the museum has gradually expanded through five adjoining palaces — Aguilar, Baró de Castellet, Meca, Mauri and Finestres — linked so that you pass from courtyard to courtyard, under wooden ceilings and up exterior staircases, between galleries. Temporary exhibitions, often exploring Picasso's relationships with other artists or particular themes, occupy one wing and can be excellent. The ceramics Picasso made in later life, donated by his widow Jacqueline, round out the collection.

Visiting well: entry is by timed ticket, and the museum is closed on Mondays. Allow ninety minutes to two hours; the collection is hung broadly chronologically, so follow the route from the childhood work through the Blue Period to the Meninas rooms. A guided visit adds a great deal here, because the story of how Picasso's style evolved is the point, and a good guide makes the leaps visible. The museum offers free entry at certain times — typically some Thursday evenings and the first Sunday of each month — but those free sessions must be booked online in advance and go quickly; they are also the most crowded times, so pay for a quiet weekday morning if you can. Bags may need to go in lockers, and photography rules vary by room.

The neighbourhood makes it easy to build a half-day around the visit. Carrer Montcada leads straight to Santa Maria del Mar, the city's most beautiful Gothic church, and the surrounding El Born district is full of small galleries, design shops, vermouth bars and tapas counters. If you want to follow Picasso further, walk to Els Quatre Gats, the modernista café near the cathedral where he first exhibited (now a restaurant), and look at the frieze he designed for the College of Architects building on Plaça Nova facing the cathedral. Art lovers should also note the Fundació Joan Miró on Montjuïc and the National Art Museum of Catalonia, both superb, for a second art day.