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Lot Essay
A photo-certificate from Maya Widmaier Picasso dated Paris, 17 February 2000 accompanies this drawing.
The circus theme preoccupied Picasso from late 1904 to the fall of 1905, as he was working on his monumental composition Les saltimbanques (Zervos, vol. I, no. 285; coll. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Together with his new lover Fernande Olivier, the poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob, as well as artist-friends working in the studios at the Bateau-Lavoir, Picasso frequented the nearby Cirque Medrano, where he made numerous sketches of the clowns, acrobats and performers.
The four male figures on the left side of the present work display the same massive physique and oversize limbs of the seated male figure in the oil painting Acrobate à la boule (Zervos, vol. I, no. 290; coll. The Pushkin Museum, Moscow), and of the male figure in the gouache L'athlète (Zervos, vol. XXII, no. 244; private collection). The female figure on the far right of the sheet, on the other hand, relates little to Picasso's female acrobats, who tend to be girlish and slight-of-build. Instead her form looks forward to the type of female figure which is seen in the subjects of the artist's Gosol period (summer, 1906), with slender torsos set upon heavy thighs and legs, as in the painting La toilette (Zervos, vol. I, no. 325; coll. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo).
The circus theme preoccupied Picasso from late 1904 to the fall of 1905, as he was working on his monumental composition Les saltimbanques (Zervos, vol. I, no. 285; coll. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Together with his new lover Fernande Olivier, the poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob, as well as artist-friends working in the studios at the Bateau-Lavoir, Picasso frequented the nearby Cirque Medrano, where he made numerous sketches of the clowns, acrobats and performers.
The four male figures on the left side of the present work display the same massive physique and oversize limbs of the seated male figure in the oil painting Acrobate à la boule (Zervos, vol. I, no. 290; coll. The Pushkin Museum, Moscow), and of the male figure in the gouache L'athlète (Zervos, vol. XXII, no. 244; private collection). The female figure on the far right of the sheet, on the other hand, relates little to Picasso's female acrobats, who tend to be girlish and slight-of-build. Instead her form looks forward to the type of female figure which is seen in the subjects of the artist's Gosol period (summer, 1906), with slender torsos set upon heavy thighs and legs, as in the painting La toilette (Zervos, vol. I, no. 325; coll. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo).