Françoise Gilot might be best known as Picasso's consort (from 1943 to 1953) and chronicler of their lives together (in Life with Picasso by Gilot and Carlton Lake, 1964), but she was, and still is, an accomplished artist and printmaker in her own right. This portrait of their firstborn, Claude Picasso (b. 1947), belongs to a series of fourteen portraits of Claude that Gilot created between January and March of 1949. In a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner, Gilot adopts a whimsical, distorting style and line.

As the artist recently remembered, Picasso had been enamored of sailors' costumes since his own childhood in the 1880s. These costumes were not only outmoded by the late 1940s but could not be found in Paris. As a compromise, and to please Picasso, Gilot finally procured, in the south of France, a child's pinafore with an embroidered blue anchor. Here, the chubby Claude clutches a banana and sports the hard-won sailor's blouse over short green pants.