Picasso, Study for Three Women at the Spring

The Orangerie typically displays two studies on this subject side by side. Picasso painted this one in 1921 while staying in Fontainebleau, at a moment when the French art world, weary of constant innovation, was turning back toward classicism, a mood Picasso's own work here reflects.

What's notable is that this is a study, not a finished painting, and the two versions differ in small but telling ways: in the larger study, the woman on the left carries a jug balanced on her head, while in the smaller one she holds it in her hands instead.

These studies eventually led to the finished painting, Three Women at the Spring, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Picasso was working simultaneously, during this same period, on the Cubist painting Three Musicians, a strikingly different style altogether, a reminder that he never settled into one manner for long but kept experimenting in several directions at once.