Portrait de Jacqueline is a linocut executed by Pablo Picasso in 1959, during the period of sustained experimentation that preceded the great colour linocut series of the early 1960s. Produced in collaboration with master printer Hidalgo Arnéra at Vallauris, the work is printed in a single colour — a fine black line on blue-grey paper — and shows clearly the economy and directness that characterise Picasso's approach to portraiture in this medium.

The subject is Jacqueline Roque, who had entered Picasso's life in 1953 when she was working at the Madoura pottery in Vallauris. By 1959 she was his constant companion and, from 1961, his wife — and she had already become by far the most frequently depicted figure in his work. Where the colour linocuts of 1962 and 1963 present Jacqueline costumed and theatrically elaborated, Portrait de Jacqueline takes a different approach entirely. The image is a study in restraint: her face rendered in near-continuous line, hair loosely falling to the shoulders, the features observed with a directness that sits closer to drawing than to the more constructed idiom of the later prints. The date inscribed in reverse in the upper left corner — a characteristic quirk of the linocut process, in which text appears mirrored unless deliberately compensated — grounds the work precisely in the moment of its making, giving it the quality of a dated studio notation as much as a finished multiple.

The blue-grey tone of the paper is not incidental. Picasso was highly attentive to the relationship between ink and support throughout his career, and the cool ground here both softens the starkness of the single black line and lends the image a silvery, almost photographic quality — an effect that reinforces the sense of direct observation rather than stylisation. This gives the work one of the most intimate and least mediated of all his Jacqueline portraits: a record of looking, made permanent through one of printmaking's most physically committed techniques.
Portrait de Jacqueline occupies an important position in the chronology of Picasso's late work, sitting at the threshold between the relatively modest linocut experiments of the late 1950s and the ambitious large-format colour prints that would follow. It is a work that rewards close attention precisely because of what it withholds — the full chromatic and compositional elaboration of the mature linocuts — allowing the quality of the line itself, and the intensity of Picasso's scrutiny of his subject, to carry the entire pictorial weight.

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