Magnum Editions Poster: Pablo Picasso playing with his son, Vallauris, France, 1948

While on assignment in the South of France in the summer of 1948, Robert Capa, who had met Picasso’s partner Francoise Gilot in Paris a few years previously, spent time with the couple and their children on the Côte D’Azur. “Capa was a friend, so it was not formal at all”, Gilot said of the photographs Capa took of them during that period, which depict the artist playing in the sand on the beach with his son and dutifully carrying a shade over Gilot’s head. The tender portraits caught by Capa show Picasso as a barefoot, carefree father, enjoying life’s simple pleasures: a side of the artist that had seldom been seen. Capa’s images capture not just a great artist, but a family man, and have become some of the most memorable pictures ever taken of Picasso.