<span>Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, in Málaga, on the southern Spanish coast. He was christened Ruiz after his father, and Picasso after his mother, in the traditional Spanish way. His background was modest; his father, José Ruiz Blasco, supported his family by teaching drawing at the local art school. Picasso was introduced to art by his father, who loved to paint the pigeons that flocked in the plaza outside the family home. Sometimes Picasso's father asked his young son to finish his paintings for him; the precocious boy was more than able to do so. By the time he was 13, his budding talent already overshadowed his father's. He very quickly grasped naturalistic conventions in his drawing; he said later, "I never drew like a child. When I was 12, I drew like Raphael." The imagery of his earliest work was derived from both conventional academic studies–the usual subjects that artists trained themselves on at the time, such as figure studies based on plaster casts–and his fascination with the bullfight, which he shared with his father.</span>
