Pablo Picasso

Brooke Street Gallery, London
Private Collection, Toronto (acquired in 1969)
Lillian Heidenberg Fine Art, New York
Private Collection, United States (acquired from the above in 2001 and sold: Christie's, London, February 10, 2005, lot 682)
Acquired at the above sale

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Oeuvres de 1967 et 1968, vol. XXVII, Paris, 1973, no. 439, illustrated pl. 179
The Picasso Project, ed., Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture: The Sixties II, 1964-1967, San Francisco, 2002, no. 67-045, illustrated p. 279

Executed in cream colored paper, not laid down. Sheet is hinged to a mount at two places along the top edge on verso. Edges are cut. Very faint mat stain around the extreme perimeter of the work, less than 1/2 cm wide. Sheet is slightly time darkened overall but medium line is strong and colors of the crayon are fresh. A few remnants of a prior mounting are visible on the edges on verso with some associated skinning to the verso in places. Otherwise fine. This work is in very good condition.
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After a serious illness temporarily slowed his artistic production in the early 1960s, Picasso returned to near peak levels of creative output in the latter years of the decade. From 1967-68, the artist embarked upon a series of drawings that depict erotic encounters between a musketeer and a nude woman.

The musketeer became a personal emblem and an alter-ego for the artist. As seen in the present work, Picasso often portrayed the character wearing a long jacket with a ruff collar, probably referencing the portraits of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Anthony van Dyck. Picasso may have also been inspired by Alexandre Dumas’s novel Les Trois mousquetaires in his depiction of the noble character. In this drawing, the artist captures the musketeer holding his sword in a suggestive position that emphasizes its role as a symbol of virility and power. The continual reappearance of the musketeer persona throughout his later work intimates Picasso’s humorous outlook on his own advancing age.