Women with Guitar

Mujer con guitarra dates from 1898, when Picasso was seventeen and had withdrawn from the Real Academia de San Fernando in Madrid to spend several months in Horta de Ebro, in rural Tarragona, recovering from illness at the home of his friend Manuel Pallarès.

The drawing shows a seated woman in profile, wrapped in a dark shawl, a guitar held upright in her lap. Executed in coloured pencil on a small sheet, it belongs to the abundant graphic production of these formative years, in which Picasso drew constantly from the life around him.

The Horta Period

The months in Horta marked a decisive shift. Away from academic instruction, Picasso worked from direct observation — peasants, interiors, the landscape of the Ebro basin — developing the fluency of hand that would underpin everything that followed. He later remarked that everything he knew he had learned in Horta.

The economy here is striking. The figure is built from a few sure strokes, the shawl in dark accumulated line, the skirt indicated with a pale blue hatching that leaves the paper largely bare.

Subject and Motif

The guitar appears throughout Picasso’s work across seven decades, from these early observational studies to the Cubist constructions of 1912 and beyond. Its presence in a drawing of 1898 is not yet symbolic — the instrument is simply there, held by a woman the young artist was watching.

The monogram inscribed within an oval at the upper right belongs to Picasso’s early practice of signing, before he settled on the form that would become familiar.

Provenance & Documentation

Presented in a period carved and gilded frame.

Provenance: Private Collection Certificate: Administración Picasso Reference: MC-GRO-02