Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto

Picasso's bohemian friend Angel Fernandez de Soto, with whom he shared a Barcelona studio, gazes out with a melancholy air, his face and the bare interior steeped in the cold blue of the period. Known among their circle as a hard-drinking carouser, he is rendered here with sober tenderness rather than gaiety. Now in a private collection, the portrait is a fine example of Picasso's Blue Period - friendship and dissipation recorded in chilly, mournful tones, the young painter turning the faces of his impoverished Barcelona companions into images of quiet, universal sadness.