Le peintre Sébastien Junyent

Sébastien Junyent, the son of a Barcelona philanthropist, was trained as a painter and wrote art criticism for the Catalan modernist journal Joventut. He arranged to have drawings by Picasso published in Joventut, and became one of the artist's earliest collectors. In 1903, while both men were in Barcelona, they painted each other's portrait as tokens of their friendship. The portrait on Junyent's easel in the present drawing contains the outlines of his portrait of Picasso, in which the latter was dressed in an overcoat, scarf and hat. In the completed version of the portrait, Junyent incorporated in the background a detail of Picasso's La Vie (Zervos, vol. 1, no. 179; coll. The Cleveland Museum of Art), painted in Barcelona during this time. It is likely that Picasso made and dedicated this sketch of Junyent as his friend was painting his portrait, and that the date of 1900 ascribed to this drawing in Zervos is too early.