The Weeping Woman - Famous Paintings and their Hidden Histories–Autumn 2025

Artist and art teacher Áine Andrews returns with another series of lectures on Famous Paintings and their Hidden Histories. In each lecture, Áine will focus on a particular painting to recount its history, as well as that of the artist and their story.

The lectures can be attended as a series, but are also designed as standalone talks, which can be attended individually. See series info »

Week 2: The Weeping Woman

Pablo Picasso, 1937

Tate Gallery London

The Weeping Woman is one of a series of portraits by Pablo Picasso that are among the most wrenching in the history of art. Their appearance in 1937 can be seen as emblems of the upheavals that convulsed Europe during the tumultuous years preceding World War II.

His wife Olga and seventeen-year-old Marie Thérese Walter feature in some of the drawings and etchings but his new mistress, the photographer Dora Maar is the face most closely associated with the weeping woman. 

Picasso said of the work:

For years I’ve painted her in tortured forms, not through sadism, and not with pleasure, either; just obeying a vision that forced itself on me. It was the deep reality, not the superficial one… Dora, for me, was always a weeping woman….And it’s important, because women are suffering machines.”

1. Tues 28 October
Portrait of Hugh Lane by John Singer Sargent – Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane Dublin

2. Tues 4 November
The Weeping Woman by Pablo Picasso – Tate Gallery London

3. Tues 18 November
Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels by Clara Peeters – The Mauritshuis the Hague

4. Tues 25 November
The Birth of Venus by Botticelli – Uffizi Gallery Florence

5. Tues 2 December
The Taking of Christ by Caravaggio – National Gallery of Ireland Dublin

6. Tues 9 December
Nativity Window by Evie Hone – Manresa – Jesuit Centre of Spirituality Dublin