charming Picasso anecdote

Françoise Gilot describes her first visit to his studio in the Latin Quarter in May 1943:

“I saw several old Louis XIII sofas and chairs, and spread out on them, guitars, mandolins, and other musical instruments, which, I suppposed, Picasso must have used in his painting during the Cubist period. He later told me that he had bought them after he painted the pictures, not before, and kept them there now as a remembrance of his Cubist days.”

It is remarkable that an artist famous for his ability to work from memory, without models or objects, would turn to objects after the fact in order to anchor his memories of a bygone phase of his career.