Pablo Picasso Jacqueline Roque Portraits For Sale

Jacqueline Roque met Pablo Picasso in 1952 at the Madoura pottery in Vallauris, where she was working and was related to Suzanne Ramié, and she became his companion, his second wife from 1961 and the last of his muses, described by Picasso himself as “the last model and companion of the painter”. She stayed with him for his final two decades through the studios at La Californie near Cannes, at Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins and at the Château de Vauvenargues, and she appears in his work from 1954 onwards, becoming in the curator Malén Gual’s words for the Museu Picasso in Barcelona “one of the main leitmotifs of his production”.

The Musée Picasso in Paris describes her black almond-shaped eyes, long brown hair and proud bearing as making her a model of the Mediterranean female portrait, and the Museu Picasso notes that her appeal to him lay in her ability to slip into different pictures from his imagined museum of art, so that she could resemble a sitter by El Greco or, in another light, one of Delacroix’s harem women, and Picasso told the writer Pierre Daix that he had thought so much about Delacroix’s Women of Algiers that he found La Californie, adding “And Delacroix had already met Jacqueline”. In the semi-abstract portraits the features are exaggerated into dark eyes, arching eyebrows and high cheekbones, often combining a profile and a frontal view in a single head in the way of Cubism.

The portraits here move between media as he did, with lithographs of the later 1950s in which she sits serene and concentrated, full face or in three-quarter view, an aquatint of 1961, the year of the marriage, a ceramic wall plaque of 1956, and the colour linocuts of 1959 to 1964 from his years of printing with Hidalgo Arnéra, several of which show her in the flowered and straw hats that gave the series its character, so that the same profile appears in lithograph, aquatint, clay and colour linocut.

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