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Picasso had said: "That bastard, he's really good." At that time Picasso was sixty-five years old. What made Picasso unique was that he never outgrew his need to borrow from the masters. After 1945 this occurred regularly. During World War II, Francoise Gilot described two small gouaches Picasso painted during the occupation of Paris.They were painted from a reproduction of a bacchanalian scene by Poussin, "The Triumph of Pan" (91A). He told Francoise Gilot he planned to paint his own version of Delacroix's "Women of Algiers." This was in 1946 and demonstrated that Picasso still had that need to identify with and challenge the accepted masters of his profession. He had to see how he measured up to their reputations. He appeared to have a need to compare himself and his work with them on their "own grounds" so to speak. His early copies proved he was equal to the old masters. As an "old master" himself he seemed content to caricature their work much like a child defacing photographic reproductions in magazines by drawing over the faces. The image was still there, but it was definitely changed after Picasso worked it over. His imposed forms do not necessarily combine with the content of the masters' work. To Picasso this may have been more of an act of magic whereby he "devoured" the work of the masters and acquired their creative "power." (Picasso qtd. in Gilot 192).

Picasso's art dealer Kahnweiler commented “Picasso took me up to the attic once again with his nephew Fin to look at the pictures after Delacroix's "Femmes d'Alger," on which he was working. Picasso said: "I wonder what Delacroix would say if he saw these pictures." I replied that I thought he would understand. Picasso: "Yes, I think so. I would say to him: "You had Rubens in mind, and painted a Delacroix. I paint them with you in mind, and make something different again” (Kahnweiler 12).

Picasso seemed to express some concern about this practice yet dismissed it as one common to artists and felt justified by his results.

He demonstrated this identification with the masters early in his career. Hilton commented on an early self-portrait (4) “It might be retitled "Portrait of the Artist as Van Gogh," for the derivation is so frank as to amount to some sort of identification. Like the late tragic portraits of Van Gogh that Picasso would have seen at Vollard's, the painting is basically frontal but turned slightly towards the left, and employs exactly the same powerful and compact single outline against a very shallow

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