The present portrait is a timeless rendition that stands out within the series of paintings devoted to the artist’s raven-haired wife. Painted over several days in June of 1962, the canvas crystalizes Jacqueline’s image at the height of Picasso’s late career, immortalizing his wife in fluid, paint-laden brushstrokes. Depicting Jacqueline in an armchair, a favorite motif that appears throughout Picasso’s oeuvre that generally served as a vehicle for expressing the palpable sexual tension between the painter and his model, she is also depicted in “double-profile,” a stylistic device invented in his portraits of Dora Maar, but the roots of which go back to his cubist experiments with multiple view-points. While borrowing elements from his own artistic past, Picasso here created an image with a force and freedom he only achieved in the last decade of his career.

Though Jacqueline claimed never to have modeled for the artist, her doting omnipresence in Picasso’s world informed nearly every aspect of his creation during these years; her almond eyes, dark hair and aquiline nose proliferating within his paintings, sculptures, drawings and ceramics. Their love engrossed the artist and propelled him to new heights, experimenting with the figure of his muse in all manner of color and pose, though never obliterating or demonizing her visage in his work as he had done with past muses.