As Tate Liverpool prepares to host a major Picasso exhibition, Laura Davis speaks to a Southport man who met the artist

BENEATH her wrinkles, there was still something of the young woman whose figure had been captured on canvas by one of the greatest artists of the 19th century.

She was old now, but the memory of that experience was still something to brag about to visitors to the small French town of Cagnes-sur-Mer.

“She popped her head out and said ‘quand j’etais jeune, je posais pour Monsieur Renoir’. Of course, it had been many years before,” recalls Max Eden, who was staying in the area in the 1950s.

Cagnes was a young artist’s dream. Not only was there an opportunity to exhibit in the town – Eden’s landscapes were hung alongside those of Picasso and Chagal in the local chateau – but there was also the chance that you might bump into one of your heroes.

At the time, Picasso was working in a ceramic studio “so small that he had to have his pictures coming from downstairs and moving upwards through the ceiling” remembers Eden, who was first introduced to the Spanish painter as he was leaving the building.

“He was OK . . . fine,” says the retired Southport College teacher of the artist once described as “a molten mind comparable to a volcano in constant eruption”.

“I asked him a silly question. I said ‘who do you think was the best painter of the lot?’ He said, ‘Sans doute, Cezanne’.”

Picasso's favourite potter, Josef Llorens Artigas, who also worked with Joan Miró, told Eden the painter was “all right, but he was sometimes very rude indeed.”

Born in St Helens, Eden completed a fine art course at the Liverpool College of Art before spending a year studying at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, in 1952.

With a part-time teaching course at the Lycée de Nice, he was able to afford to stay in Cagnes.

His timing always appears to have been perfect.

As well as Picasso, in the French town he met Matisse, who was sitting up in bed at the time ripping out paper shapes that would form his famous “cut-outs” or paper collages.

In 1957, Eden arrived in the mountains of Cataluña, just as Artigas was preparing Miró's famous mural Wall of the Sun, using 1,000kg of wood per day to fire his Chinese-style kiln.