Picasso’s at-hand art supplies during those early days of postwar reconstruction included panels of fiber cement and Ripolin — basically Sheetrock and house paint — as well as plywood, and Picasso used them all to create pastoral scenes like “La Joie de Vivre” in which a curvy female nude clearly modeled on Gilot dances joyously in an idyllic Mediterranean landscape amid flute-playing fauns and dancing goats. The painting, the unofficial icon of the Antibes period, is among the most beloved treasures of the museum’s collection, which also includes portraits of striped-shirted fishermen and dreamily reclining nudes.

Both the artist and the museum curator acknowledged that had they set out to create a Picasso museum, it may never have happened. In the end, the sheer quantity and scale of the works determined that some sort of legacy would remain at the chateau. The current exhibit reunites those large works, which Picasso could not take with him when the cold drove him from the drafty chateau in November, with smaller ones that he did carry away (and that are now returning for the first time). Included among them are many drawings never before exhibited that provide a window into Picasso’s artistic process, which Bernardo Laniado-Romero, former director of the Picasso museum in Malaga, Spain, describes as “the laboratory” of his ideas. “If you want to understand the meanings of his paintings, you need to look at the drawings he was creating at the same time,” Laniado-Romero said in an interview.

Several drawings on view trace Picasso’s evolution of the theme of the “femme-fleur” — images of a woman (again, Françoise Gilot) transformed into a flower — that seem almost childlike representations of fertility. Indeed, in the fall of 1946, she was already pregnant with the first of their two children, but as she recounted in her 1964 memoir “Life with Picasso,” their day-to-day existence was not all flowers and joie de vivre. She eventually left him in 1953 — the only one of his lovers to do so.

Not far from the museum, Picasso often sketched at the beach at La Garoupe, a cove on the Cap d’Antibes. Today, beyond the usual swimming and sunbathing, the beach offers travelers a lovely promenade winding along the sea. In the old town of Antibes, there are lots of charming cafes, restaurants and crêperies to try out, and a bustling morning produce and flower market changes in the afternoon to a place where artisans sell handicrafts.

A few miles northwest of Antibes is Vallauris, where Picasso and Gilot moved in 1948 and raised their two young children, Claude and Paloma, until 1953, and where Picasso explored the medium of ceramics. Georges and Suzanne Ramié, owners of the Madoura factory, a producer of the region’s traditional platters, pitchers and other pottery, were as clever as Dor de la Souchère had been at the Château Grimaldi. By offering Picasso a place to work, they in turn created a good business for themselves.