“The artist’s genius succeeds in giving us the impression that it is the Mediterranean sun that pours in through this narrow window and starts to dissolve the shadows of night.”

This engraving is part of the Vollard Suite, named after Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939), the famous art dealer, who commissioned it.¹ In addition to promoting the work of painters like Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin in his gallery as from 1894, Vollard was a leading publisher and his Albums des Peintres-Graveurs featured artists like Pierre Bonnard, Auguste Renoir and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. He met Picasso in the spring of 1901 and organised his very first show in Paris at his gallery on Rue Lafitte with over sixty paintings in the Post- Impressionist style, which sold quite well. Vollard soon turned his back on Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period, however, and did not become a regular buyer of his work until 1906 despite the crucial part he had played in supporting the young artist during his first few years in Paris. 

When he commissioned this suite of one hundred prints, which Picasso produced in his fifties between 1930 and 1937, Vollard also secured the services of Roger Lacourière, one of the great masters of printmaking, who pulled the first proofs in 1937. After this, Picasso marked the set of proofs Bon à tirer and added his signature.² Lacourière then undertook the printing of the suite in three sets on vellum, 250 on Montval paper watermarked Vollard or Picasso, and 250 on Montval paper watermarked Papeterie Montgolfier à Montval. 

The Vollard Suite, in which Picasso explored the different expressive possibilities of printmaking, is often associated by virtue of its heterogeneity and freedom of execution with the tradition of caprices,³ as exemplified in particular by Jacques Callot in 1617 and Francisco de Goya in 1799. In 1956, however, in what is unquestionably the first monograph on the subject, the art historian Hans Bolliger distinguishes two groups: one of twenty-seven “free” prints on no specific subject and the other of seventythree divided into five coherent series on the following subjects: the sculptor’s studio, Rembrandt, rape, the Minotaur and portraits of Vollard. 

Faune dévoilant une femme (Faun Revealing a Sleeping Woman), one of the late prints in the suite by date, belongs to the first “free” group, also known as Diversion, le plaisir d’aimer.⁴ It presents a subject repeatedly addressed by Picasso that made its first notable appearance in his work in 1904 with the watercolour Meditation (New York, Museum of Modern Art), which shows the artist gazing upon a sleeping beauty, Fernande Olivier, his mistress at the time. Part of the great tradition of Western painting, the subject is drawn from mythology and especially Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The particular points of reference in this case are Titian’s Pardo Venus (1551, Paris, Musée du Louvre) and Rembrandt’s Jupiter and Antiope (1659), both of which show a faun uncovering the beauty of a sleeping woman. 

The execution is worthy of the greatest printmakers. Even though Picasso had only just discovered the technique of sugar-lift aquatint, he employed it here with remarkable skill and power. Deftly combining the subtlest effects of wash obtained with the brush and the fine lines of the scraper, he succeeded in channelling all of his talent for drawing and painting into printmaking. As Roger Passeron points out: “The artist’s genius succeeds in giving us the impression that it is the Mediterranean sun that pours in through this narrow window and starts to dissolve the shadows of night.”⁵ It should also be noted that this composition, structured diagonally by the shaft of light penetrating the room, echoes the classic early Renaissance depictions of the Annunciation (Fra Angelico, 1430). As is often the case with Picasso, an autobiographical reading can be superimposed on the mythological subject, which thus becomes a pretext. This timeless scene of contemplation, if not indeed of veneration, which also constitutes a pagan reference to one of the most mystical episodes in Christianity, can also be interpreted as an allusion to Marie-Thérèse Walter, the artist’s young mistress, for whom he developed a deep passion in 1927. She gave birth to their daughter Maya in September 1935, just a few weeks after Picasso’s separation from his first wife Olga, who married him in 1918. 

Emilia Philippot 

Francesco Federico Cerruti purchased the aquatint from the collection of David Teiger before 1993. Indeed, the work features in the handwritten inventory compiled in June of that year [Ed.].

¹ Vollard 1937.

² The 100 Bon à tirer plates of the Vollard Suite were donated to the Musée national Picasso-Paris by Roger Lacourière’s widow in 1982.

³ M. Müller (ed.), “L’artiste et son double”, in Münster 2002, p. 18.

⁴ Cannes 2012.

⁵ Passeron 1984, p. 76.