Pablo Ruiz Picasso returned to the English pub that refused to paint him

Six Bells, in the small English town of Chiddingly, retains the character of a traditional English pub. It is an 18th century stone building, with old posters and signs everywhere that takes you back to another time. Many of them were in those very walls when Pablo Picasso walked through the door. It was 1950, when the painter was already world famous, the artist of “Guernica”, the same person who had just turned a dove into a universal symbol of peace. But at The Six Bells, none of that mattered, he was just another customer, like so many who had stopped at that spot in the middle of the Sussex countryside. That is why, when the man from Málaga wanted to pay his bill with a fee, the man on the other side of the bar flatly refused: “only in cash”, like everyone else.

The tale made a visit that would have gone forever unnoticed linked to the history (or legend) of The Six Bells. Because until then, a simple Picasso doodle on a napkin was more valuable than a cup of coffee. The event appears in several posts, including reviews recommending the place on platforms like Tripadvisor. And now, more than 70 years later, Picasso has returned to the setting of the bar he refused to paint. Just around the corner from Six Bells, in the Millennium Sculpture Park, the UK’s first dedicated genius sculpture has just been unveiled.

Two Picasso faces sculpted by Anthony de Padgett stand out on each side of an oak block crowned by a peace dove. It represents only two Picasso trips to the UK: the first in 1919 with the ballet Rosses Sergey Diaghilev, and the second in 1950 when he was to speak at the World Peace Conference in Sheffield. Before or after this event, the man from Malaga stopped very privately at Chiddingly. A few months ago, two of his best friends, photographer Lee Miller and artist Roland Penrose, moved there. They both acquired Farley Farm, a picturesque farmhouse in the Sussex countryside that has now been converted into a cultural and arts center open to the public.

Six Bells Pub is a pleasant stroll from Farley Farm, a route now taken by the many tourists who come to see the art collection Miller-Penroses amassed over decades of friendship with Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Max Ernst, and Joan Miro. Among other things. And that was Picasso’s voyage in November 1950, ready for a drink at the local bar. When he arrived he discovered he had no money in his pocket and offered a small fee in return, a formula he had already used on previous occasions as a means of payment or thanks. But here it did not work. “The answer was no, so he had to go home,” Paul Newman, the pub’s current owner, explains in a BBC report. And when the interlocutor asked him if he would accept her today, he replied: “Yes, I recognize him, of course. And if not … yes, why not? Even if by grace ».