Sold for: $61,250

PROVENANCE
Acquired directly from the Artist by Sir Roland Penrose, London, 1964
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
Modern Drawings, Paintings, Sculpture, Tableaux and Working Models comprising The Shakespeare Exhibition and Panorama, Stratford-upon-Avon, Sotheby's, October 2, 1965
Acquired from the above by I. Jack Lyons, London
By descent to the present Private Collection, Toronto, 2015

LITERATURE
Pablo Picasso and Louis Aragon, Shakespeare, 1965, reproduced
John Rydon, "The £1,000 doodle by Picasso," Daily Express, October 4, 1965, page 8, reproduced
The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare Series, 1968 - 1969, reproduced on the covers
Shakespeare: His World and His Legacy, 1981, listed and reproduced page 159

EXHIBITED
The Shakespeare Exhibition and Panorama, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1964-1965
Mitsukoshi Ltd., Tokyo, Shakespeare: His World and His Legacy, travelling to Osaka and Nagoya, October 1981, catalogue #YG16

In 1964, a major show was held in Stratford-upon-Avon to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare. The Shakespeare Exhibition and Panorama gathered paintings, drawings, models, and sculptures related to the playwright, and over the course of its nearly two-year opening was attended by some 500,000 visitors, including the Royal Family. In November 1963, Roland Penrose, then-director of London’s ICA and Pablo Picasso’s close friend and biographer, asked the artist to consider how he would do a portrait of the playwright, with the aim of including the resulting work in the festival. The following April, having lost the example images Penrose provided to work from, Picasso quickly executed three portrait sketches from memory in felt pen on a paper pad, of which this lot was the first. The result is a fantastically free interpretation of one great artist by another.

I. Jack Lyons, an industrialist and chairman of the sponsorship committee that financed the quartercentenary exhibition, purchased this work in a sale of the exhibition’s contents in October 1965. That same year, Picasso’s three portraits of Shakespeare, as well as 8 sketches of the playwright in the role of Hamlet, were reproduced and compiled in the limited edition folio “Shakespeare,” published alongside the text of a short story by Louis Aragon entitled “Mumure." This work was also reproduced on the cover of the John Dover Wilson editions of Shakespeare's works, published by Cambridge University Press in the late 1960s.

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