Picasso was a member of the French Communist Party, and his party commissioned him to design the poster for the 1^st World of Peace Conference, held in Paris in 1949. Time was running out, and the drawing was nowhere complete, so the poet and writer Louis Aragon visited Picasso’s studio to encourage the artist to get to work. “Aragon then looked through the portfolio containing the most recent lithographs, and when he came across the dove, he declared that it looked exactly like the biblical dove of peace and that it would be the symbol of the conference. Pablo agreed, and by nightfall, posters depicting the dove of peace had begun to appear on the walls of Parisian houses. … the poster travelled the world in the name of peace.” The painter’s daughter with Françoise Gilot’s was born on the day of the peace conference, which is why she was named Paloma – the word for “dove” in Spanish.