Woman with Yellow Hair

As previously mentioned, Picasso's career moved through radically different phases - each shaped, in large part, by his economic circumstances and the women in his life.

By this point he had been secretly having an affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter for 4 years - she was seventeen when they met and he forty-five.

Marie-Thérèse became his muse and the subject of endless portraits : rounded, sleeping, sensuous, in warm yellows and greens.

This is one of the most tender of those portraits.

The sleeping figure fills the canvas, her yellow hair spread across the pillow.

The forms are simplified almost to abstraction, but the mood is unmistakable.

The Marie-Thérèse paintings are among Picasso's most beloved works - a long way from the more disjointed and analytical flavor of Les Demoiselles or Cubism.

They show another Picasso entirely : lyrical, sensuous, almost gentle.

Fun fact : Marie-Thérèse only learned that she was the subject of these paintings years into the relationship.

By the mid-1930s, he moved onto his next muse and lover - Dora Maar - a surrealist photographer, whose tortured portraits - fractured, anguished and stripped of tenderness - could not be further from these.

However Marie-Thérèse remained devoted to Picasso throughout her life.

She never recovered from his death in 1973 and took her own life 4 years later.