Executed on Christmas Eve 1959, La fille et le moine belongs to a cycle of ink wash drawings that Picasso completed after his purchase of the impressive Château de Vauvenargues in 1958. Nestled in the foothills of the iconic Mont Sainte-Victoire mountain that had proved so inspirational to Cézanne years before, Picasso found immediate inspiration in the austere and rugged Provençal landscape, explaining to a concerned Kahnweiler that it brought him back to the Spain of his youth. Unsurprisingly then, his work from this time is populated with Spanish imagery and motifs including toreadors, troubadours and the frequent appearance of his last companion, Jacqueline Roque wearing a traditional mantilla and peineta. As with many of these drawings, Picasso playfully exploits the narrative and dramatic potential of the scene here, as the demure young girl turns coyly away from the roving hand of the corpulent monk, while the hunched old woman to the left of the composition plays the part of ‘La Celestina’, the procuress urging the young woman forwards.

Appearing here hooded and bent-shouldered with all the exaggerated features of old age and experience clearly rendered, the figure of La Celestina had nevertheless occupied Picasso since his earliest adolescence, when he first encountered the infamously wicked procuress of Fernando de Roja’s La Tragicomédia de Calisto y Melibea (1499). Part bawdy romance and part tragedy, and dealing in themes of money, sex and death, this well-established classic of Spanish literature had an obvious appeal for Picasso, who owned a copy of the dramatic novel as a young man, and collected several different editions in his older age. Although La Celestina made an iconic appearance in Picasso’s early work as one of the defining figures of his Blue period, by the 1950s she began to ‘reappear in Picasso’s work as a symbol of the bawdy Spain that he left as a young man but often returned to in his imagination, as death approached’. (John Richards, A Life of Picasso, Vol I: 1881 – 1906, London, Jonathan Cape, 1991, p. 288).

In her connection to his Spanish roots, and as an evocative symbol of ageing, sexuality and mortality, the prominently placed Celestina in La fille et le moine functions as a cipher for the artist himself. Indeed, throughout this cycle of late drawings and the Suite 247 works which would follow, Picasso frequently placed himself in the role of the ageing, voyeuristic Celestina, that ‘decayed creature, withered and full of wrinkles’ who nevertheless still felt the stirrings of desire within herself. (Fernando de Roja’s Celestina, quoted in Picasso: The Late Drawings [exhibition catalogue], New York, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, 1988, p. 14).