Head of a Young Woman

Head of a Young Woman is a 1906 oil painting by Pablo Picasso. It depicts the portrait of a young woman with long, dark hair. The painting dates from Picasso's Rose Period, during a trip that he made to the Catalan village of Gósol. It was owned by Jaime Botín, a billionaire Spanish banker, until it was seized by the Spanish state in 2015. It is now housed at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. Background This painting dates from an important period in Picasso's development as an artist, known as his Gósol period. In June 1906, he made a short trip to the Catalan village of Gósol and stayed there for 10 weeks with his mistress Fernande Olivier. Within this period, while escaping from the Parisian art world, he dramatically changed his approach to his art. During his stay at Gósol, he produced a large quantity of works, including paintings, drawings, watercolours, gouaches, and carvings. Picasso was particularly inspired by the simplicity of Catalan Romanesque art. Elizabeth Cowling, curator of a Picasso exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, considered the trip to be of great importance, saying that it was, "the break that gave him the opportunity to absorb sources he'd recently discovered more fully and develop ideas and themes outside the competitive environment of a major city. And being such a backwater – so unmodernised – it must have reinforced his well-established penchant for the primitive." Gósol marks a major change in Picasso's artwork, as his paintings became much more simplified in form. Upon returning to Paris, he focused his attention on depicting the female body, using basic interlaced shapes and an ochre palette. This experimental approach featured the gradual emergence of geometric shapes in his works that would eventually be defined as Cubism. Description Head of a Young Woman was painted in 1906 by Picasso when he was 24 years old. It is an example of a period of his early works in the 1900s that is known as his Rose Period. The oil painting is a portrait of a young woman with long, dark hair and a sideways stare and has an estimated value of €26 million.