Pablo Picasso Etchings & Aquatints For Sale

Pablo Picasso’s first prints were etchings and drypoints made in Paris between 1904 and 1906, and they show how differently the two methods draw. Etching cuts a crisp line through a wax ground that acid then bites into the copper, and the British Museum notes that Le Repas Frugal, his first Paris print, was etched on a reused zinc plate that still carries traces of an earlier landscape. Drypoint is drawn straight into bare metal with a needle, which throws up a burr that prints as a soft, velvety line, and it gave Salomé of 1905 a quality that etching alone could not.

Aquatint added tone to the plate, with resin grains melted onto the copper and bitten by acid to give a wash like watercolour, and in 1934 the printer Roger Lacourière taught Picasso sugar-lift, in which a sugar and ink mixture is painted on the plate with a brush, lifts away in water and leaves the drawn areas open to the acid. The Museu Picasso in Barcelona records Picasso telling Françoise Gilot that “with sugar-lift aquatint everything is more direct and at the same time more delicate”, and the British Museum says it gave him a more painterly image than etching could, a direction he took further in the 1960s by combining aquatint with soft-ground etching and printing in colours on Richard de Bas paper.

His last plates are the most densely worked, beginning in 1968 with the 347 Suite, which he made in under seven months with Aldo and Piero Crommelynck, whose atelier in Mougins was near his home, building texture with greased plates and the scraper, and the group here runs on to a print after Rembrandt of 1970, so that it covers both the plain drypoints of 1905 and some of the most worked plates of his late years.

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