In the later years of Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) oeuvre, the theme of painter and his model became one of the artist’s most frequent and significant subjects. In the mid-1960s, he devoted himself almost exclusively to the theme, creating an extended sequence of oil paintings of nearly 150 canvases between 1963-65 depicting an artist at work with or without his model. This outpouring of artist and model pictures emerged during a period of Picasso’s close engagement with the masters of art history, an investigation that took on increasing importance for the artist beginning in the 1950s. Looking retrospectively at his long career and at his own position in the canon of art history, Picasso had consciously been pitting himself against masters such as Delacroix, Velázquez, Manet, and van Gogh.

In a departure from earlier versions of the artist and model theme, in the spring of 1963, Picasso took his figures out of the studio and into the countryside, heralding the arrival of spring. In Le peintre et son modèle dans un paysage [The Painter and His Model in a Landscape], Picasso places the figures in a lush verdant setting recalling Édouard Manet’s iconic Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe from one hundred years prior. The first paintings of this group of dozen canvases date to May 1st, the present painting, the culmination of the twelve in the series, dates to June 17th. In half of these pictures, the painter wears a straw hat, the artist’s reference to van Gogh; in this painting, the painter wears a 19th century-style boot with a block heel, a reference to Manet and his great masterpiece.

With the conclusion of this set of outdoor painter and model canvases, Picasso was virtually finished with this theme for the year (he continued to rework some canvases into the fall); subsequent versions and variants of this subject, painted during 1964 and 1965, all show the artist and model indoors, frequently dressed in costumes to assume the role of musicians or musketeers.