As mentioned in our Centre Pompidou walk, Picasso was extraordinarily prolific and versatile - painting works that could look like Old Masters, while also being the founder of Cubism.
He is also famous for working in radically different phases - the melancholy Blue Period, the warmer Rose Period, then Cubism and beyond.
This painting comes from his Blue Period - a moment of genuine poverty and depression in his early career in Paris, when he painted the city's poor, its outcasts, its exhausted workers - who he presumably really identified with.
The palette is all thin blue and sad shadows, the forms gaunt and elongated.
The woman leans into the iron with her whole body weight, her eyes closed or cast down, the ironing board pressing against her.
It is a life of physical labour and no relief.
There is enormous tenderness - Picasso at this period had very little himself.
Fun fact : within two years of this painting, Picasso's style would explode into the jagged pieces of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
Thirty years on, it would be the radiant, sensuous portraits of Marie-Thérèse - examples of which are also in this collection.
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