Jaume Sabartés with Pince-Nez

"Jaume Sabartés" with Pincenez exemplifies the caricatural way in which Picasso portrayed his friend – depicted from the front, looking directly at the viewer, in a pose he often repeated during his Blue Period, i.e. from 1901 to 1904.
The lightness of the lines with which Picasso had drawn Sabartés the year before in "Poeta Decadente" (MPB 70.232), also in the museum’s permanent collection, forms a sharp contrast with the strength of this portrait, based on the robust figure and close-pressed hair, the pince-nez and twisted lip that strove to capture the sitter’s scepticism. The portrait was painted from life in Picasso’s Parisian studio at 130 Boulevard de Clichy, as «Poeta Decadente» had been executed previously, a procedure that was not common in Picasso’s portraiture.
An X-ray has revealed that this portrait was painted over another work in which Picasso depicted a woman wearing the bonnet donned by the female prisoners at Saint-Lazare. Another work that stemmed from the artist’s visits to the French prison hospital late in the summer of 1901 is "Woman with a Bonnet" (MPB 112.750), also in the museum collection. Early in 1902 Picasso took his friend’s portrait to Barcelona, where it hung at the Quatre Gats tavern, mounted in an oval frame, the traces of which can still be seen on the canvas.