Picasso and Lump: the Dachshund who moved into La Californie and ended up starring in 'Las Meninas'

One morning in April 1957, a forty-year-old American photographer drove from Rome to the French Riviera in a Mercedes 300 SL Gullwing, the sports car with doors that open upward like a gull's wings. Riding shotgun was a Dachshund named Lump, a little over a year old, imported months earlier from Stuttgart. The destination was Cannes, specifically the villa La Californie, home of a bald, short, slightly grumpy seventy-five-year-old whom the international press called the Maestro. The driver was David Douglas Duncan, a war photojournalist fresh out of Korea and the author of some of the most reproduced portraits of Pablo Picasso ever published. The plan was lunch. Lump had other ideas.

Who were the players in this story?

David Douglas Duncan (1916-2018) had already published three Life covers on Picasso and held a friendship with him that was unusual for someone as private as the painter. Picasso, who by then lived with Jacqueline Roque in a late-nineteenth-century villa bought with the fortune he had accumulated after the war, accepted few visitors and almost no journalists. Duncan was a standing exception.

Lump (a German word meaning, roughly, "rascal" or "little scamp") was Duncan's second dog. The first was an enormous Afghan Hound, the photographer's official pet in Rome, who had spent his energy making the Dachshund's life miserable out of jealousy. That tense household, plus Duncan's constant travel around the world, made it look like Lump was not going to last long if he stayed. Picasso did not know that. Neither, exactly, did Duncan. The dog seemed to.

What happened on April 19, 1957, at La Californie?

Duncan photographed the scene himself and tells it plainly in his book Lump: The Dog Who Ate a Picasso (Thames & Hudson, 2006). Picasso and Jacqueline were having lunch in the villa's dining room. Lump walked in, looked at the man at the head of the table, approached without ceremony, put his front paws on the man's thighs, and gave him a kiss. Picasso, by Duncan's account, dropped his spoon and said in Spanish: "Buenos días, amigo." The dog jumped into his lap. Jacqueline, who knew the house rules (the resident dogs could enter the studio, but none sat at the table), was stunned. Lump, by every witness account, did not leave that lap for the rest of the meal.

That same afternoon, according to records held at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, Picasso took an ordinary plate off the table and painted a portrait of the dog on it in black enamel. About nine and a half inches (24 cm) across, signed and dated April 19, 1957. The plate exists. Duncan kept it. In 2011 he donated it to the Ransom Center, where it has been on display ever since. It is probably the only piece of dinnerware in the world worth, literally, more than the car that brought it to the house.

The plate Lump never used

The reason Picasso painted the plate is the best part of the story. When Duncan explained over lunch that Lump had no bowl of his own in Rome and ate from spare kitchen plates, Picasso found that unacceptable. He got up, went to the kitchen, brought back an empty plate, and started drawing on it with the sauce he had on hand. He transferred the result to ceramic paint afterward. Lump's plate, in other words, was born as the painter's culinary protest against the dog's lack of protocol. Lump, with canine consistency, never ate from it. According to Duncan, he preferred to steal food straight off Picasso's plate, climb onto the table, and keep an eye on the staff from a useful distance.

How did Lump get into 'Las Meninas'?

Four months after that first visit, on August 17, 1957, Picasso shut himself on the second floor of La Californie with everything he needed to avoid leaving the studio for weeks. He was about to do something he had been planning for years: reinterpret Velázquez's Las Meninas. He finished five months later, in December of the same year. Forty-five canvases riffing on the original that Diego Velázquez had painted in 1656 in the Alcázar of Madrid. Fifty-eight in all if you count the side variations: studies of each individual figure, the pigeons he watched from the window, the mirror's reflections. Picasso donated the complete series to the Museu Picasso de Barcelona in 1968, where it occupies a room of its own.

Here is the detail that changes everything. In Velázquez's original, in the foreground, a huge Spanish Mastiff lies at the feet of the Infanta Margarita. In Picasso's forty-five versions, that mastiff has been replaced by a Dachshund. Long and low, sketched in three strokes, recognizable as Lump to anyone who has seen Duncan's photographs. Three and a half centuries separate Velázquez's dog from Picasso's. Both now live in public collections: the mastiff in the Prado, the Dachshund in the Museu Picasso de Barcelona. Two cities, two collections, one country's painting tradition. Some people travel from one to the other as a kind of pilgrimage.

Why did Picasso swap the mastiff for a Dachshund? The simplest answer, per biographer John Richardson (Volume IV of A Life of Picasso, 2007), is also the most likely: Lump was there. Every time Picasso came down to the studio, the dog was lying beside the canvas, dozing. Picasso put him in because he was, at that moment, his dog. Some biographers have wanted to read it as a joke at the expense of stiff Spanish Baroque. Maybe. It is also possible it was exactly what it looks like: a seventy-five-year-old man from Málaga, in a French villa, painting his dog onto the most important picture of his own artistic tradition because he felt like it.

What other animals lived at La Californie?

More than you would expect. When Lump arrived in April 1957, the villa already housed a white goat named Esmeralda (a gift from Picasso's dealer, who lived in the garden and came inside through the kitchen), a fawn Boxer named Yan, two Afghan Hounds named Kazbek and Kabul (inherited from earlier chapters of his life), and a shifting flock of pigeons that Picasso lured to his studio windowsill and drew by the dozen. Lump had, then, several housemates. Duncan's photographs show interesting tension with Yan the Boxer (larger, more territorial, with a put-upon expression) and mutual indifference with the goat. Esmeralda, by Duncan's own account, preferred the parrot cages in the living room to any dog.

Why a Dachshund? Picasso's taste in dogs

Picasso kept dogs his whole life. There is a portrait of him as a teenager in Málaga with a small street-type dog. In Barcelona, during the Els Quatre Gats years (1899-1900), he appears with a terrier in several photographs. In Paris, through the Blue and Rose periods, his companion was a stray named Frika. Later the Afghans Kazbek and Kabul. The Boxer Yan. And finally, in Mougins in his last years, a Dalmatian named Perro.

The preference makes more sense in light of Penrose, his closest biographer. Picasso wanted dogs with visual personality. Dogs that read on the canvas. That is why the Afghan Hounds, with their extravagant coats, and why the Dachshund, with that impossible elongated silhouette that looks drawn by a caricaturist. In his sketches, Lump takes up more paper than many human figures. Picasso joked that Lump was the most patient model in his studio because he never complained about the length of a sitting. That was false, of course: Lump held still only when he was asleep, which was much of the day.

The end: illness, the return to Duncan, and two deaths ten days apart

Lump spent six continuous years at La Californie. He went back to Rome with Duncan now and then, but he always returned. In 1963 he fell ill: degenerative problems typical of the Dachshund's long spine, one of the most common conditions in the breed (intervertebral disc disease, or IVDD). Duncan took him to Rome for treatment. Lump partly recovered but never returned to La Californie. Picasso mentioned him in letters and conversations for years afterward, according to Richardson, with a mix of longing and resignation rare in him.

Lump died in March 1973, at Duncan's house near Cannes. Pablo Picasso died ten days later, on April 8, 1973, at his home in Mougins. He was ninety-one. The two went almost at once. Popular legend has wanted to read an emotional, almost mystical synchrony into it. Duncan, more sober, simply noted that both had run their time.

Seeing Lump's paintings today

Picasso's complete Las Meninas series (58 canvases, with Lump appearing in 45 of them) is on permanent display at the Museu Picasso de Barcelona, Carrer de Montcada 15-23. The museum occupies five medieval palaces in the Born district. The Las Meninas room is the last stop on the chronological route and tends to be relatively empty if you arrive early.

The plate painted for Lump is not in Spain. It lives at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, where Duncan donated it in 2011. It is part of the permanent Duncan archive display, alongside the photographer's Leica and Nikon F cameras. If you pass through Texas, it is worth the stop: probably the only twentieth-century utilitarian object to have had three doctoral theses written about it.

Duncan's photographs from April 19, 1957, collected in Lump: The Dog Who Ate a Picasso (2006), are still reprinted. It is the best book ever written about the relationship between a modern painter and a small dog, no contest.

Lump at a glance

Field	Detail
Name	Lump (German for "rascal")
Breed	Standard smooth-haired Dachshund
Approximate birthplace and year	Stuttgart, Germany, around 1956
Imported to Rome	Late 1956, by David Douglas Duncan
Arrival at La Californie	April 19, 1957
Years living with Picasso	About 6 (1957-1963)
Paintings he appears in	At least 45 of the Las Meninas series (1957), plus loose sketches and the Ransom Center ceramic plate
Death	March 1973, near Cannes, at Duncan's home
Days between Lump's death and Picasso's	About 10

So is a Dachshund the right dog for me? A practical note before the close

If this story has given you the itch to adopt a Dachshund, three things are worth knowing. The breed has a very high genetic predisposition to intervertebral disc disease (the same condition that struck Lump in his final years). Incidence rates run around 19-24% of dogs by recent British studies. Dachshunds are also strong-willed, prone to barking at strangers and to setting a clear hierarchy with their people. And, against the lap-dog cliché, they are not purse dogs: they were bred to hunt badgers (Dachshund is German for "badger dog"), and they keep a serious prey drive. They move, chase, dig, and go after rodents with unpleasant efficiency. Picasso noticed. In Duncan's photographs you can see several of the studio pigeons that Lump stalked with clear intent to eat them. He never managed it. Barely.

What this story tells us about Picasso

If you have read this far, you have basically read the one great intimate Picasso story that does not end in a love scandal, a family rupture, or a fight with a dealer. Picasso, by the accounts of those who knew him, was difficult with almost everyone and almost everything. With Lump, he was not. With a Dachshund who climbed into his lap in April 1957 and stole his lunch for six years running, he was, by the photographic evidence, an old man who smiles. If biographers want to understand the man behind the icon, the forty-five Meninas at the Museu Picasso are right there. Each one with its Dachshund looking back at the viewer as if to say, still, I'm here.

Frequently asked questions

In how many paintings did Picasso paint Lump?

Lump appears in at least forty-five of the fifty-eight works in the Las Meninas series (1957), held at the Museu Picasso de Barcelona. He is also portrayed on a ceramic plate about nine and a half inches (24 cm) across, signed April 19, 1957, and donated by David Douglas Duncan to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in 2011. Dozens of loose sketches survive in notebooks from the period.

Did Lump belong to Picasso or to Duncan?

Legally, to Duncan, who had imported him from Stuttgart in 1956. Emotionally, to Picasso, by Duncan's own account. The dog lived almost exclusively at La Californie between 1957 and 1963.

What happened to La Californie after Picasso?

The villa belongs to private heirs of the Ruiz-Picasso family and is not open to visitors. It sits in Cannes, on the avenue de Vallauris, and is recognizable by its modernist silhouette among the palms.

Is there a statue or monument to Lump?

No specific public monument exists, but the Museu Picasso de Barcelona sells reproductions of the ceramic-plate portrait in its shop. It works, indirectly, as a keepsake.

Did Picasso paint his other dogs?

Yes. There are visual references to Frika (the Parisian stray of the Rose period), to the Afghan Hounds Kazbek and Kabul in oils from the 1940s and 1950s, and to the Boxer Yan in some of Duncan's photographs, though pictorially Yan has far less presence than Lump.

Bibliography

The primary sources are listed in the sources field above. Duncan's Lump: The Dog Who Ate a Picasso (Thames & Hudson, 2006) is the most complete primary document, with eighty-nine original photographs and a first-person text by the photographer. For the 1957 Las Meninas series and its biographical context, Volume IV of John Richardson's A Life of Picasso (Jonathan Cape, 2007) covers the La Californie period in detail. The Museu Picasso de Barcelona's catalogue raisonné details Lump's forty-five appearances in the series with inventory numbers and specific dating.