Weeping Woman

I've just been to the excellent exhibition 'The Discovery of Spain' at the National Gallery in Edinburgh. It has a lot of fabulous paintings as well as a few really dull ones, not a big fan of some sentimentalist paintings of children (apart from the Millais which is beautiful).

I discovered a few Scottish artists I wasn't really aware of and their pictures were amazing, from Roberts with his complex drawings of interiors of cathedrals and the external ornament of the Alhambra, to Phillip and his fantastic unfinished work of small Spanish boys playing at bull fighting - which was among my favourites. The Velazquez and El Greco - some of them familiar from the main gallery. Some really incredible water colours by Arthur Melville, another Scottish artist

But last of all in the final gallery a really powerful painting by Picasso called the Weeping Woman. Apparently he made a number of studies on this theme at the same time as he was painting Guernica and it is incredibly moving. I love icons and I think this is a painting that I could pray with. It's the anguish and pain of the woman for the loss and awful destruction during the Spanish Civil War and it's all the more powerful for the fact that the woman appears to be wearing her best suit and her hat with the flower in it. An ordinary woman caught up in tragic circumstances.

If you get a chance to see it you should go.