"Poeta decadente" [Jaume Sabartés]

This drawing of his friend Jaume Sabartés was one of the series of portraits shown by Picasso in February 1900 at the Quatre Gats tavern, alongside the oil painting Last Moments, which was displayed at the Exposition Universelle held in Paris that same year. The show made Picasso known to the general public and, more importantly, to the artists of the city; despite being a marginal exhibition, it did get a mention in the press.
This portrait, in which Picasso ridiculed his friend’s literary ambitions, seems to have been inspired by Santiago Rusiñol’s Hojas de la vida (1898), to be precise by the story entitled «Deseo» and the illustrations accompanying it, made by Ramon Pichot. In this text, characteristic of the aesthetics of decadentism, Rusiñol –a key artist for the young Picasso– praises the lakes inside caves, ideal cemeteries for men, peaceful places of sublime natural beauty. Picasso remained more faithful to the literary text than to the illustrations by Pichot (who would become a close friend of his), and reproduced the setting created by the cemetery and the lake. Sabartés was disguised as a «decadent poet», as evoked by the title of the drawing, his character emphasised by the lily in his hand, the cape and crown of flowers. As Sabartés himself would recall many years later, «Picasso hands me a paintbrush and asks me to sit for him: hold it in your fingers, as if it were a flower…» (Picasso. Retratos y recuerdos, 1953).