Jacqueline Roque: Picasso’s last muse

When Picasso’s biographer, John Richardson, first met Jacqueline Roque, he thought she was a ‘free spirit’. It is not a characteristic usually applied to the artist’s second wife and enduring muse. Running through her was a molten core of fierce devotion. Her life with Picasso was an exercise in subjugation; she thought constantly about what would interest and amuse him.

Yet there was a time — a few short years in the mid-1950s — when Roque seemed as carefree as confetti. Having left her first husband in West Africa, she moved to the French Riviera with her little daughter to live in the seaside town of Vallauris, then in its heyday as a glamorous resort for playboys and artists. Marc Chagall and the actor Jean Marais were neighbours.

Jacqueline had an allure that went beyond her black hair, sapphire-blue eyes and opalescent skin. She was clever, spoke three languages, and was self-assured and uninhibited, careening around the Corniche in an old Simca like Alberto Ascari in the race of his life.

When Picasso spotted her at the Madoura Pottery in 1952, he was captivated by her unconventional beauty. It was a Delacroix of a face: she looked like an odalisque, and he wanted to paint her as a character from Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement. He called her Madame Z.

Their courtship was complicated. Françoise Gilot, with whom Picasso had two children, was still on the scene, yet Picasso’s friend Jean Cocteau immediately recognised the strength of their feelings, and when Gilot left for Paris, Jacqueline stepped into her place. ‘One can’t leave that poor man alone like that, at his age,’ she said. ‘I must look after him.’

From that moment, Jacqueline became, in the words of the Surrealist writer Michel Leiris, ‘diffusely omnipresent’. Of all Picasso’s lovers — and there were many — Jacqueline is the most painted. She drifts in and out of his pictures, taking on one role and then another. If the human body was Picasso’s most enduring subject, rendered and remodelled endlessly, then Jacqueline’s form, above all, is its final expression. ‘Jacqueline has the gift of becoming painting to an unimaginable degree,’ wrote Picasso’s friend Hélène Parmelin. ‘She has within her that wonderful power on which the painter feeds. She flows. She is made for it and gives of herself and devotes herself and dies in harness though living all the while.’

Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of Jacqueline’s death in 1986, Christie’s is offering several portraits of Picasso’s final muse, beginning with Prints and Multiples (online until 24 September 2026) and including the 20th/21st Century Evening Sale in Hong Kong (29 September), the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale (14 October) and the Impressionist and Modern Works on Paper Day Sale (15 October).

One of the works that best exemplifies her appeal is Nu couché III (1969), from the collection of the late Swiss art dealer and collector Angela Rosengart. Jacqueline’s voluptuous body, languid and erotic, is drawn in strong dark lines, revealing the strength of her personality. ‘It is her body that we are able to explore more exhaustively and more intimately than any other body in the history of art,’ wrote Richardson in Late Picasso.

If Nu couché III is Jacqueline at her most breathtakingly beautiful, then a series of linocuts reveal just how much Picasso could manipulate her features, distorting and exaggerating her profile — as in the 1959 Cubist work Portrait de Jacqueline accoudée, where she is depicted at her most enigmatic.

Picasso often associated colours with his muses, perhaps most famously the mauve he used in portraits of Marie-Thérèse Walter. For Jacqueline, he chose yellow, green, black and red — colours inspired by their first house together, La Californie, in the hills above Cannes. It was a place Picasso loved for its Orientalist appearance, where Jacqueline could be both chatelaine and odalisque. Femme Nu III, from 1964, was painted after they moved to Mougins, yet the colours of La Californie remained intrinsic to her character.

Yet, for all their happiness, the couple knew time was running out. As Picasso looked death in the face, he painted Jacqueline in mourning. In the 1972 work Nu assis (Jacqueline), he depicts his wife as a grieving widow, raging against the light: an unhallowed creature, vengeful and self-enslaved, her head little more than an open-mouthed scream.

In 1955, as if foreshadowing the inevitable tragedy, Picasso made a linocut that captured an aspect of Jacqueline’s personality rarely seen in public, presenting her as fragile and intensely vulnerable. When William Rubin, curator at MoMA in New York, saw the work, Profil de Jacqueline au foulard, he was struck by its power, noting that the Jacqueline it portrayed was one ‘often discovered in Mougins following Picasso’s death. No other portrait in any other medium so totally captures these tragic aspects of her nature.’

After Picasso died, in 1973, Jacqueline was cast adrift and unable to navigate the turbulent waters of his legacy. She shunned society. She had lived completely for Picasso and found life without him unbearable. Yet, as her friend the journalist Pepita Dupont recalled, in the last years of Jacqueline’s life, that free spirit could still be found at the wheel of her Porsche, accelerating through the French countryside, cutting through the air with a thunderous purr.

Prints and Multiples is on view until 23 September 2026 at Christie’s in London, followed by the Hong Kong 20th/21st Century Evening Sale (on view 22-29 September). The 20th/21st Century Art auctions in London take place from 14 to 21 October

Related artists: Pablo Picasso