Pablo Picasso

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris
Galería Theo, Madrid & Valencia
Private Collection, Spain (acquired from the above in 1981. Sale: Sotheby's, London, 3rd February 2004, lot 51)
Purchased at the above sale by the late owner

Oslo, Galleri Haaken, Picasso: Peintures - Sculptures - Dessins, 2004, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, œuvres de 1962 et 1963, Paris, 1971, vol. 23, no. 62, illustrated pl. 27
The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. The Sixties I, 1960-1963, San Francisco, 2002, no. 62-253, illustrated p. 283

The canvas is unlined and there is no evidence of retouching under ultra-violet light. This work is in very good original condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate, although the blue tones are slightly less warm in the original.
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Although it is not identified as such by its title, Femme au chapeau assise. Buste is a portrait of Jacqueline Roque, Picasso's devoted second wife who remained with him until the time of his death in 1973. Picasso's renderings of Jacqueline constitute the largest group of images of any of the women in his life. The artist first met Jacqueline in 1952, while he was still living with his mistress Françoise Gilot, and by 1954 the raven-haired beauty began to appear in his paintings. Unlike Françoise, Jacqueline was ever-accepting of the notoriously temperamental artist and his blind obsession with his art, and took care of him ceaselessly in his old age. Picasso experienced a calm and peace with this woman that he had not felt since his days with Marie-Thérèse and, like his golden mistress, Jacqueline became his muse for some of his most imaginative compositions.

 

Picasso painted the present work at the end of October 1962, about a year after he and Jacqueline were married. Choosing pale blue, grey and black for his palette, he depicted her seated in a chair and wearing a fashionable hat, not unlike the one that his mistress Dora Maar had worn for many of her portraits in the 1930s and early 1940s. Although her image has been partially abstracted by the bifurcation of her face, the dark and dramatically arched eyebrows and the beautifully curved eyelids are unmistakably those of Jacqueline. Throughout their life together, Jacqueline served as a model for several of Picasso's reinterpretations of art historical masterworks, including his studies of Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe and Delacroix' Femmes d'Algiers. But here, the artist has chosen to paint her not in any narrative context, but rather as the singular object and focus of his attention.