Still Life with Portrait (C.131) places a woman's face — rendered in the bold outline and blue hatching of Lichtenstein's comic-book figure work — inside what reads as a framed picture or mirror on the wall behind a table of domestic objects. A lemon, a plate of cherries, a dark jug, and a draped curtain occupy the lower half; the woman's face occupies the upper left, looking out from her frame with the composed directness of his early 1960s figure paintings. Two genres, developed across entirely separate parts of his career, share the same picture plane without either one subordinating itself to the other.

The painting-within-a-painting had been a device in Western art since the sixteenth century — a way of folding questions about representation into the surface of an image that was already about depicted objects. Lichtenstein's version does this without reaching for it: the woman's face is there because it belongs to the visual world his work had always inhabited, the same figure who appeared in the romance and domestic paintings that established his reputation now present among fruit and drapery.

The print also introduced debossing into the Six Still Lifes — physical marks pressed into the paper that give the surface a tactile depth the image itself refuses. That combination of depicted flatness and actual physical relief was characteristic of how Lichtenstein used the print medium in this period, the material properties of the object working in counterpoint to the logic of the image it carried.

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