Femme nue à la source is a colour linocut executed by Pablo Picasso in 1963, printed on Arches vellum paper and signed and numbered in pencil in the lower right margin. The print dates from the celebrated sequence of large-format colour linocuts produced at Vallauris in collaboration with master printer Hidalgo Arnéra — the body of work that represents the culmination of Picasso's output in the final decade of his life, and in which the technical demands of the reductive linocut method became inseparable from the expressive ambition of the image.

The work places a crouching female nude at a natural spring, her body bent low over the water source at the right of the image, surrounded by the dense, almost oppressive forms of trees and foliage rendered in deep black. The figure is printed in a warm terracotta brown, her form built from the characteristic parallel contour lines that Picasso employed throughout the linocut series — a technique that gives the body a sense of volume and internal rhythm while remaining entirely legible as a product of the cut. Against the dark, heavily worked background, the nude reads as something ancient and elemental, the act of drawing water from a spring connecting the image to a pastoral and mythological tradition stretching back through European art to antiquity.

The palette of black and warm brown is unusually restrained for the colour linocuts of this period, many of which deploy a broader chromatic range. Here the near-monochromatic scheme intensifies the contrast between figure and ground and gives the work a sombre, concentrated mood quite distinct from the more exuberant prints of 1962. A bird perches at the upper right, its presence adding a note of the fable or the pastoral idyll without disturbing the image's underlying sense of solitude. Femme nue à la source is among the more quietly powerful works of the series — a late meditation on the female figure in nature, handled with the full authority of Picasso's command of the medium.

For more information or to buy Femme nue à la source by Pablo Picasso, contact our specialists using the enquiry button above.
Browse Picasso signed prints for sale, or enquire about selling Picasso prints.