Pablo Picasso was born in 1881 in Malaga, Spain, and grew up in Barcelona, where he associated with a large group of artists and writers that gathered at Els Quatre Gats café. In 1904 Picasso settled in Paris and became friendly with artist Georges Braque, with whom he developed Cubism, and writers Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire. Picasso's painting style changed many times throughout his career, and he produced a range of images from classical figures to radical abstractions. He exhibited widely and is considered one of the most important and influential figures in twentieth-century art. Besides being a prolific painter and draftsman, Picasso was also an accomplished sculptor and printmaker and produced ceramics and theatrical designs. He died in Mougins, France, in 1973.
In 1927, when he was forty-five, Picasso met Marie-Thérèse Walter, a seventeen-year-old French schoolgirl who became his mistress. In retrospect their relationship seems the happiest and least public of Picasso's many amatory alliances, and no other woman is more intricately woven into the fabric of his art.
In this painting of Marie-Thérèse, the time is night and the scene is intimate: she sits reading at a table in a room illuminated by only a small lamp. One hand gently holds open the pages of her book while the other touches her garland-crowned head with fingers that resemble feathers. The space of the room is compressed, but the resulting distortions are never severe. Sinuous rhythms absorb the straight linear accents of the table, and the exaggerated height of both table and plant emphasizes the young woman's childlike appearance. Her pale blond hair and blue-white skin make her look especially ethereal within this dark and deeply colored interior. The canvas, one of several similar compositions Picasso painted of his mistress, is a poem by a man in love.
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