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1903, Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Sebastian Juner Vidal -- Los Angeles County Museum of Art

From the museum label:

 

This portrait of Picasso's close friend and fellow artist exemplifies the artist's Blue Period of 1901-4.

Sebastià Junyer Vidal was a near-constant companion when Picasso was moving between France and Spain in the early 1900s, and the subject of a series of caricatured, bawdy drawings placing him (and sometimes Picasso himself in the company of sex work-ers. Here, Junyer Vidal is heavily outlined and solidly worked in the characteristic blues and greens of Picasso's other paintings from the Blue Period, while the unidentified woman wearing a red flower in her hair is much more hurriedly rendered. In 1975 LACMA's painting conservators discovered the figure of a dog painted underneath what eventually became the woman and cate table, providing some explanation for the difference between the two figures.

 

As a native Spanish-speaker (Picasso moved to Catalan-speaking Barcelona at age fourteen), the artist inscribed this portrait to Junyer Vidal in the bottom right of the composition using the Spanish spelling of his friend's name.

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Uploaded on September 2, 2019
Taken on March 30, 2019