By 1907 Diego received a grant from the Governor of Veracruz to study art in France. He agreed to finance Rivera’s plans to go to Europe to study painting with Paul Cezanne, who’s work he has only seen printed in magazines. Rivera leaves for Spain in 1907 and from Spain goes to Paris by 1909, he would have gone to Paris sooner but Cezanne had died by the time he went to Europe and Rivera never gets to study with Cezanne, but he will meet the Cubist artists Cezanne had inspired when he finally gets to Paris. In Paris he meets many new friends and acquire new influences. He sees the work of the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and is inspired by the new methods of artmaking he finds there. In the summer of 1909 Rivera meets the artist Angeline Belloff, a Russian émigré, who later becomes his common law wife. They have a daughter together that Diego later refused to acknowledge. The couple stayed together for most of the rest of his European years. Diego returns to Mexico in 1910 and has a one man show of his Spanish paintings, paintings that he did not like very much, but the sale of these paintings helped finance his return to Paris and Angeline by September of 1911. By his return in late 1911 Rivera is really starting to explore the new methods and styles of painting that were exploding around Paris at this time and his Futurist inspired painting Portrait of Adolfo Best Maugard of 1913

Portrait of Adolfo Best Maugard, 1913

is accepted in the Salon des Independants and gives him an amount of success and notoriety in the Paris art circles that he previously did not enjoy. By 1912 he is in his Cubist phase exploring the new concepts of space and form within the 2-dimentional limitations of the painting plane. Rivera is a fixture of the Parisian art scene but he still has yet to meet the great Picasso, one of the founders of the Cubist Movement, the painting style that Rivera was experimenting with.

Angel Zarraga, Rivera's mother Maria del Pilar Barrientos de Rivera, Angelina Beloff and Diego Rivera, 1915