Portrait of an Adolescent

With his move to Paris in 1904, Picasso's palette gradually lightened. Figures from the world of the traveling theater and the circus, full of the joy of life, replaced the melancholy themes of the Blue Period (1900–1904). This work belongs to the new phase. Many of the drawings of those years combined techniques - ink and wash or wash and watercolor - and were usually preliminary sketches for details of oil paintings. Possibly made as a study for the left-hand figure of Les Saltimbanques (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), this drawing was done in the same year as the painting. Both show the head in profile, the expression serious and the gaze concentrated, deep in thought. The two differ, however, in a number of details, such as the unruly hair, and the almost exaggeratedly long, bare neck in the drawing, as opposed to the scarf tied around the neck in the painting.