Picasso is shown sitting on the stairs of his studio at rue des Grands Augustins in Paris. This staircase location also features in a celebrated photograph by Denise Colomb from 1952 in which the same sculpture of an owl is visible beside Picasso, but in which Picasso wears his overcoat.

Four unpublished photographs of Picasso.

Robin Muir records that: forty two negatives of Picasso are at Vogue and that Deakin’s assignment to photograph Picasso was the first step in his rehabilitation at Vogue following his first sacking. It was an unexpectedly successful portrayal of a painter entirely accustomed to the camera, so much so that the writer Bruce Bernard remarked that it was a photograph ‘which is not one of Picasso’s performances or examples of his own vanity, or if it is an example of his vanity, it is not done on Picasso’s terms.' The session was not entirely trouble-free. One of Picasso’s drawings lent as a prop, had been by the end of the sitting, mislaid.

We are grateful to Robin Muir for his assistance in cataloguing this work.