Self-Portrait with Wig

The museum houses a wide collection of Picasso’s early self-portraits. These comprise a group of works produced during his period of training, and include drawings with sketches and caricatures, as well as portraits of the artist amid other figures, such as those in which he appeared in the company of the friends of his youth.
Picasso spent the academic year 1897/98 in Madrid, where he had moved to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. However, he would soon abandon his studies and frequent instead the Círculo de Bellas Artes [Fine Arts Circle] and the Prado Museum to contemplate works by the old masters. This picture in which Picasso portrays himself in a wig and a large tie in the fashion of the seventeenth century was painted in Barcelona and dates back to the period immediately following his experience in Madrid, c. 1898–1900. It is one of the oil paintings that show the development of the young artist’s style and one of the stages in the construction of his own image. By casting a new look at himself he was moving away from academicism, using nimble free-flowing brushstrokes that are at once precise to claim his connection to the originality of classical painters such as El Greco, Velázquez and Goya.
The seemingly unfinished strokes we discover in the background composed of dark tonalities belong to an underlying painting. Further-more, the brushstrokes surrounding the face after the application of the flesh tints remain as a testimony of his working process, avoiding an elaborate finished ground. Nonetheless, the composition has a high degree of definition, to a great extent derived from the concentration of much of the light in the greys and whites of the figure’s wig and collar.