It depicts an elderly musician, a haggard man with threadbare clothing, who is hunched over his guitar while playing in the streets of Barcelona, Spain.

At the time, having renounced his classical and traditional education and searching for fame, Picasso and his friend Carlos Casagemas moved to Paris.

For example, the monochromatic color scheme creates flat, two-dimensional forms that dissociate the guitarist from time and place.

In addition, the overall muted blue palette creates a general tone of melancholy and accentuates the tragic and sorrowful theme.

[citation needed] Furthermore, the guitarist, although muscular, shows little sign of life and appears to be close to death, implying little comfort in the world and accentuating the misery of his situation.

Details are eliminated and scale is manipulated to create elongated and elegant proportions while intensifying the silent contemplation of the guitarist and a sense of spirituality.

If Picasso attempted to portray the world of poverty and abject misery, it was because that had been his own plight as a struggling young artist in Barcelona, where he painted many pictures including this one, of the poor.

"[3]In The Old Guitarist, Picasso may have drawn upon George Frederic Watts's 1886 painting of Hope, which similarly depicts a hunched, helpless musician with a distorted angular form and predominantly blue tone.

Despite these discoveries, the reason Picasso did not complete the composition with a mother and child, and how the older woman fitted into the history of the canvas, remain unknown.

[5] In 2019, researchers at University College London used a neural network to recreate the painting found by infrared camera.