A WRITER AT LARGE: Lunch with Pablo, Dinner with Henri ; in 1946 RAYMOND MASON, a Young English Sculptor, Packed His Bags and Moved to Paris, Then the Undisputed Artistic Capital of the World. in This Extract from His Memoir of Half a Century as Part of the City's Competitive Cameraderie, He Recalls His Friendships with Two of the 20th Century's Greatest Artists, Pablo Picasso and Henri Cartier-Bresson

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I met Pablo Picasso for the first time in the summer of 1952. When Mimi, my girlfriend, and I went to visit him in Vallauris with his nephew, the delightful Xavier Vilato, he was working on ceramics in the studio of the potter Ramie. There were seven or eight of us in all, and Picasso had decided to show us his studios on the hills overlooking Vallauris. They were giant barns, and when Picasso made to open the largest of the doors I realised for the first time just how small he was, for the key, attached to a chain on his belt, only just reached the key-hole.

What he particularly wanted to show us were the huge surfaces waiting on the walls for the moment he would paint …