Picasso's Blue Period was done in hot, bright hues. The painting considered the first of his Blue Period, "Casagemas in His Coffin", was completed later in 1901 when Picasso was sinking into a major depression. Picasso, normally an outgoing socializer, withdrew from his friends. Picasso's bout of depression was to last several years. Picasso's career had been promising before 1901 and early in that year he was making "a splash" in Paris. However, as he moved towards subject matter such as society's poor and outcast, and accented this with a cool, anguished mood with blue hues, the critics and the public turned away
Ralph Ellis (painter) as a portrait and landscape painter and, in a highly specialised field of art, as a designer and painter of inn signs. By the end of his commercial career he had painted well over two hundred signs for the Henty & Constable brewery alone. Ralph retired from his inn sign painting business in 1951 and then dedicated the rest of his life to landscape painting. He died in Arundel in 1963 - a commemorative blue plaque was erected by West Sussex County Council on his home at 47 Maltravers Street, Arundel in May 1995. He exhibited a portrait of "Arthur