Gary Tinterow writes of this drawing: "Together Picasso and Stravinsky combed the junk shops of Naples in the spring of 1917 for old gouaches of the city and scenic postcards. A year later, the artist turned to these souvenirs as source material for his work. He executed several drawing from postcards of sturdy, stocky Neopolitan women selling fish (Z III 243-246); around the same time, he made his drawing of a fisherman carrying his day's catch in a basket on his head.

"In contrast to the smooth, swollen volumes of the Neapolitan women, this fisherman has a nervous, angular quality reminiscent, as Alfred Barr observed, of figures by El Greco. Once Picasso felt satisfied with the naturalism developed in the still-lifes from Avignon and the portraits of Jacob and Vollard, he experimented with various modes of stylization, often looking back at some of his own works. Thus the Neapolitan women echo the pneumatic nudes he drew late in 1906; while the Fisherman echoes the Greco-like Composition, also of 1906, which depicts a young girl and a flower-vendor. The figures of both the flower-vendor and the fisherman are compartmentalized into lozenge-shaped areas which emphasize the play of patterns. The limbs of both figures were dramatically lengthened. At first the enlargement of the hands and feet of the figure in this drawing seems to conform to the rules of perspective. Closer examination, however, reveals that the distortions follow a different logic. The figure's left arm, for example, is both in front of and behind his left hip. The left leg should be behind the body because of the radical foreshortening of the calf; but the size of the foot pulls the leg towards the foreground. In short, nothing recedes or diminishes despite the great animation of the figure, and the fisherman exists simultaneously on the surface and in space." (Master Drawings by Picasso, exh. cat., Cambridge, 1981, p. 142)