?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 8,000
PABLO PICASSO Les Saltimbanques.
Drypoint, 1905. 286x330 mm; 11 1/4x13 inches, full margins. Edition of 250. Printed by Louis Fort, Paris. Published by Vollard, Paris. From the same-title suite. A very good impression with strong contrasts and crisp, inky plate edges.
Picasso began his prolific career with a focus on etching, and gained expertise in collaboration with Parisian master printers Eugène Delâtre, Louis Fort and Roger Lacourière. In the 1940s, he redirected his attention to lithography, working with Fernand Mourlot and his Paris atelier, finally changing his direction once again in the late 1950s/1960s to focus on linoleum cuts.
Coinciding with his Rose Period (or Circus Period) of painting, Picasso's first series of etchings, generally known as La Suite des Saltimbanques, and created at the outset of his career at only 24-years old, are mostly candid representations of the lives and private moments of acrobats and gypsies. Picasso frequently attended the Cirque Médrano in Montmartre, Paris, during his early career and empathized with the circus entertainers, just as he had chosen to follow the bohemian life of an artist, on the fringe of society and as a performer--creating works which would dazzle the art buying public--rather than pursue the path of a young bourgeois professional. Among the 15 prints that comprise this series is one of Picasso's most important graphic works, the melancholic portrayal of a gypsy couple at a sparsely set table known as Le Repas Frugal. (Bloch 1).
The first impressions from the 15 plates in the series were pulled by Delâtre in Paris in 1904-05 and only a small number of proofs were made; these are exceedingly scarce today (some of these impressions were also hand-signed by the artist). Subsequently, in 1913, the publisher Ambroise Vollard commissioned Fort to print an edition from the then steel-faced plates which consisted of a deluxe edition of approximately only 28 impressions on Japan paper and a regular edition of 250 impressions on wove paper (these were all unsigned impressions). Bloch 7; Geiser 9 II c.
