Jacqueline Profile to the Right is a lithograph executed by Pablo Picasso in 1958, signed and numbered in pencil in the lower margin. The work is a scraper lithograph — a technique in which the artist works from dark to light, laying down a heavily inked black ground on the stone and then scratching back into it with a scraper to reveal the white of the paper beneath. Together they produce inverts the usual logic of drawing, in which marks are added to a light ground, demanding instead that the artist think in terms of light excavated from darkness — a discipline that gives the finished print its characteristic intensity and drama.

The technique is perfectly matched to the image. Jacqueline Roque is presented in three-quarter profile turning to the right, her face emerging from a dense field of scratched white lines that radiate outward from the figure like light or energy, the surrounding darkness pressing in from all sides. The handling of the hair — long fluid strokes of scraped white against the black ground — is particularly assured, the lines describing both the fall and movement of the hair and the luminous atmosphere that surrounds the figure. The face itself is modelled with greater density, the features built up through overlapping and cross-hatched marks that give the skin a textured, almost sculptural quality entirely different in character from the pure contour lines of the earlier Jacqueline lithographs.

The inscriptions visible in the upper right corner, reversed as is characteristic of lithographic work drawn directly on the stone, record the dates of the working sessions — a reminder that this image was built up progressively, state by state, each session adding or removing material until Picasso arrived at the final form. What results is one of the most psychologically arresting of all his portraits of Jacqueline — a face pulled from darkness with an urgency and concentration that speaks directly to the intensity of his scrutiny of his subject.

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