Biography | Pablo Picasso — The First Solo Show He Hung Himself at Els Quatre Gats

Els Quatre Gats still occupies the ground floor of Casa Martí, at Carrer de Montsió 3 in Barcelona's Gothic Quarter.

Josep Puig i Cadafalch designed the neo-Gothic house in 1896.

Pere Romeu opened the café here on 12 June 1897, copying the idea of Paris's Le Chat Noir: cheap food, a piano, shadow plays, and walls that doubled as a gallery.

Picasso began coming in 1899, after a short, unhappy stretch at the academy in Madrid and a convalescence at Horta de Sant Joan.

He was eighteen.

His father already taught at La Llotja down the hill.

In February 1900 the young painter put up his first solo exhibition in this room.

He hung the work himself.

Contemporary notices say the drawings and sketches went on the wall without frames and without a printed catalogue, crowded rather than spaced.

Among the paintings was Last Moments, a canvas he had already shown in Málaga.

La Vanguardia reviewed the show on 3 February 1900.

Diario de Barcelona followed on 7 February.

Neither review made him famous.

They did put his name in the Barcelona papers as a working artist, not as a professor's son.

The café closed in 1903 when Romeu ran out of money.

It has been revived since, and the present restaurant is a later business in the same rooms.

What has not moved is the address.

From here Picasso left for Paris later in 1900 with Carles Casagemas.

The Barcelona years that followed — the Blue Period sitters, the studio on Riera de Sant Joan — grew out of the crowd that used this bar.

Stand under Puig i Cadafalch's doorway and you are in the first room that treated him as a public painter.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons user, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons