Succession Pablo Picasso (inv. 08725–08742);

By inheritance to his daughter Marina Picasso;

Private collection

Picasso. Opere dal 1895 al 1971 della Collezione Marina Picasso, 1981, exhibition catalogue, Centro di Cultura di Palazzo Grassi, Venice, no. 155–64, illustrated.

Pablo Picasso: Collection de Marina Picasso, exhibition catalogue, L’Association des musées d’art, Yomiuri Shimbun Sha, Japan, 1986–87, pp. 273–76, illustrated.

The Presence of Ingres. Important works by Ingres, Degas, Picasso, Matisse and Balthus, exhibition catalogue, Jan Krugier Gallery, New York, 1988, p. 65, illustrated.

A. Wofsy, Picasso’s Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings & Sculpture: Neoclassicism II, 1922–1924, San Francisco, 1996, no. 23–107, illustrated p. 146.

E. Mallen, Online-Picasso-Project, no. 23:180.

This elegant drawing captures in strong lines the refined features of one of Picasso’s favourite muses—the beautiful and sophisticated American socialite Sara Murphy (1883–1975). A well-bred young woman from a wealthy Cincinnati family, Sara moved to Paris in 1921 with her husband Gerald, where they quickly became the centre of a celebrated circle of artists and writers that included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Cole Porter, Fernand Léger and Pablo Picasso. The Murphys proved inspirational to a number of these figures—Sara and Gerald were the models for Fitzgerald’s Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender is the Night, and Sara, with whom Picasso was madly (though unrequitedly) in love, became the subject of many of the artist’s paintings and drawings created in the year 1923, when the Picasso family joined the Murphys on holiday on the French Riviera.