Pablo Picasso

Acquired by the present owners circa 1998

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, œuvres de 1964, Paris, 1971, vol. 24, no. 184, illustrated pl. 68
The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. The Sixties II 1964-1967, San Francisco, 2003, no. 64-180, illustrated p. 93

Executed on cream wove paper, not laid down, attached to the mount at the reverse of all four corners. The upper edge is deckled. There is a minor crease running vertically down the centre of the composition which is intrinsic to the sheet's original preparation. The work is in very good original condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although the paper is lighter in tone in the original.
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As was the case for many of the female figures Picasso depicted at the end of his career, the women in this composition with their full dark hair and large eyes bear a striking resemblance to the artist's wife Jacqueline.  Although Picasso never had Jacqueline pose for him in his studio, her image dominated the artist's pictures in the last decades of his life. Estrella de Diego describes the entrance of Jacqueline into the life and work of the artist: 'Jacqueline appeared at a perfect moment in the life of Picasso, an older man who was beginning to be overwhelmed by many things, from his family life to his success, as [Roland] Penrose explained. And as a result of a casual encounter, which recalls that between Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal, a shop assistant before she posed for the English artist, Jacqueline came to embody – from the abstract to the concrete, from portraits to representations of the essence of woman – each and every one of the characters Picasso needed, as he had always done in the past, to activate the pictorial formulae that corresponded to his enduring obsessions, even including a certain unfashionable orientalism. And she ended up being, suddenly, the model, that recurrent character in Picasso's painting ever since Les Demoiselles d'Avignon; bodies on the stage... where the gaze of the voyeur can finally be at ease: everything is there, right there' (E. de Diego, 'Self-Portrait of the Artist with Model Nearby', in Picasso, Musas y Modelos (exhibition catalogue), Museo Picasso, Málaga, 2006-07, p. 30).