Picasso's Blue Period from his works. Members of the public were uninterested in displaying the Blue Period works in their homes. Picasso continued his output, but his financial situation suffered: From 1901 to 1903, he painted several posthumous portraits of Casagemas, culminating in the gloomy allegorical painting "La Vie", painted in 1903 and now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. The same mood pervades the well-known etching "The Frugal Repast" (1904) which depicts a blind man and a sighted woman, both emaciated, seated at a nearly bare table. Blindness is a recurrent theme in Picasso's works of this period, also represented in "The
Blue blue with a hint of green, which was ideal for painting skies. It was a favourite background colour of the German painter Albrecht Dürer. Another blue often used in the Middle Ages was called tournesol or folium. It was made from the plant Crozophora tinctoria, which grew in the south of France. It made a fine transparent blue valued in medieval manuscripts. Another common blue pigment was smalt, which was made by grinding blue cobalt glass into a fine powder. It made a deep violet blue similar to ultramarine, and was vivid in frescoes, but it lost some of its