Pablo Picasso

Paul Rosenberg & Co., New York (possibly acquired from the artist)

Godfried Gilmour, England (acquired from the above on April 1945)

The Earl of Belmore, Ireland

Private Collection (sold: Sotheby's, London, June 28, 1999, lot 37)

Thomas Ammann Fine Art, Zürich (acquired at the above sale)

Private Collection, Seattle

New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Masterpieces of Drawing, 1945

New York, C&M Arts, Picasso: The Classical Period, 2003

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Oeuvres de 1920 à 1922, vol. 4, supplément aux volumes 1 à 3, Paris, 1951, no. 262, illustrated p. 94

The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture, Neoclassicism I, 1920-1921, San Francisco, 1995, no. 21-052, illustrated p. 180

Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso, From the Ballets to Drama (1917-1926), Madrid, 1999, no. 989, illustrated p. 263

As Alfred Barr notes, "The ballet and theatre, portraits and beach scenes…provided Picasso with most of his figure subjects during the four years before 1920. But about that year he began to take an interest in the mythology of Greek and Roman antiquity...Picasso‘s neo-classicism was, of course, a part of a broad, complex reaction against the excesses and violent originalities of pre-war movements such as cubism, expressionism and primitivism. By 1920 cries of back to Poussin! Back to Ingres! Back to Seurat! Rang through Paris…back to the Greek and Romans!…During his Italian trip in 1917 he visited Pompeii, and doubtless the museums of classical art in Rome and Naples, though what he saw there seems to have affected his art very little, at least for two or three years thereafter" (Alfred Barr, Picasso-Fifty Years of his Art, New York, 1966, p.115).

The subject of bathers depicted in the present work appears in Picasso’s work during the late teens and early 1920s. Visits to the seaside, first at Biarritz, where he completed the celebrated 1918 painting Baigneurs (Zervos, vol. 3, no. 237) and later on the Côte d’Azur, provided Picasso with new themes in which sunbathing, watersports and the nude bodies of bathers found a place amongst everyday scenes of life on the beach. Some interpretations of Picasso’s classicizing style during this period also rely to some extent on significant changes in his life. After his marriage to Olga in 1917, the move to rue La Boétie and the switch to the Paul Rosenberg Gallery, Picasso began to associate with a more worldly bourgeois set whose conformist tastes revelled in a smoother and more conservative approach to both style and content, seen as a new start following the turmoil of the war.  However, though this change in style accorded with the cultural mood of the period -- that of Cocteau’s Antigone, Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Valéry’s Jeune Parque – Picasso’s classicism can in no sense be equated with academicism.