Pablo Picasso

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris

Bernice Johnson Winston, United States (sold by the Estate: Christie's, New York, May 20, 1981, lot 525)

Alexandre Iolas, Paris

Private Collection, Europe (acquired from the above in 1982 and sold: Sotheby's, London, February 8, 2011, lot 32)

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Paris, Galerie Louise Leiris, Picasso, peintures, 1962-1963, Paris, 1964, no. 68, illustrated in the catalogue 

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, oeuvres de 1962 et 1963, Paris, 1971, vol. XXIII, no. 291, illustrated pl. 135

The Picasso Project, ed., Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. The Sixties I, 1960-1963, San Francisco, 2002, no. 63-179, illustrated p. 388

The theme of painter and his model is one of the great recurring motifs of Picasso's late oeuvre. The artist's exploration of this theme particularly intensified during the years of 1963-1964: "Picasso painted, drew and etched this subject so many times in his life that, as Michel Leiris has remarked, it almost became a genre in itself like landscape or still-life. In 1963 and 1964 he painted almost nothing else: the painter armed with his attributes, palette and brushes, the canvas on an easel, mostly seen from the side, like a screen and the nude model, seated or reclining" (M.-L. Bernadac in Late Picasso (exhibition catalogue), The Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 74). 

In February of 1963 Picasso began to sketch numerous compositions of the painter and model in the studio, often creating four or five drawings in the same day. It was not until late April or early May of that year that he began to set the scene out-of-doors. Here is the artist shaded by a parasol and large brimmed hat (Z. XXIII 250 & 251) and the model reclining in a striped cloth folding chair (Z. XXIII 257 & 259) in the spring and early summer sunshine. Throughout the next several months of hot weather, painter and model moved back and forth with ease between the interior and exterior view. 

Throughout this series of large canvases, the figure of the painter almost exclusively occupies the left-hand side of the composition, while the nude female model occupies the right half, their respective spaces clearly divided by the artist's easel. While in the later variations of this theme men and women are seen in costume, often assuming roles such as musicians or musketeers, in the 1963 series the protagonists are unmistakably the artist himself and the model he is painting. The lush outdoor setting that Picasso chose for the present painting is an echo of his series of Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, which preoccupied him several years earlier. Through the introspective theme of the painter at work, and the association with Édouard Manet's great masterpiece, Picasso was, during this mature stage of his career, consciously positioning himself within the canon of Western art.