In the mid-1950s, when Picasso embarked on a series of his own versions of Eugène Delacroix's Femmes d'Alger, he would take [Françoise Gilot] on average once a month to the Louvre to study the original. "I asked how he felt about the Delacroix," she relates. "His eyes narrowed and he said, 'That bastard. He's really good.'"

—Michael Findlay, The Value of Art