Picasso’s daughter Maya, aged just two-and-a-half at the t.mes , is the subject of this bold and playful full-length portrait painted on 4th February 1938. Filled with exuberant colour and energy, it was executed shortly after the artist had completed the monumental Guernica, and encapsulates the happiness Maya brought into Picasso's life during these challenging years (figs. 1 and 2).

Maya, named María de la Conceptión after Picasso’s beloved late sister, was the fruit of the passionate love between the artist and his young muse and mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter. She was born in secret in 1935 while Picasso was still married to his first wife, the former ballerina Olga Khokhlova. Maya’s birth coincided with a personal crisis which Picasso later referred to as ‘the worst period of his life’ (John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Minotaur Years 1933-1943, New York, 2021, p. 93). A combination of factors contributed to this dramatic attestation including a lengthy divorce battle with Olga and the associated loss of his beloved property, Château de Boisgeloup, which he was forced to hand over following their separation in 1935, and at the same t.mes the worsening political situation in Europe and the growing inevitability of war.

Maya’s arrival helped Picasso overcome a nearly year-long abstinence from painting. As Émilia Philippot and Diana Widmaier-Picasso note, her birth ‘was greeted by the artist as a resurrection’ and ‘spurred a need to tenderly draw this new family life, the symbol of a happy present’ (Exh. Cat., Paris, Musée National Picasso-Paris, Maya Ruiz-Picasso, Daughter of Pablo, 2022, p. 12). Maya would later comment on Picasso’s artistic rebirth in the following way: ‘I was to bring something new to his interpretation of a child: I was a girl. From one point of view it was marvellous – a child he had had with Marie-Thérèse, a daughter, the worst woman in a man's life apart from his mother – the impossible mistress! He had to find a way of seducing this little goddess!’ (quoted in W. Spies, ed., op. cit., p. 60).

Between January 1938 and November 1939, Picasso painted Maya obsessively, executing around fourteen portraits of his young daughter. As Werner Spies writes, ‘These depictions constitute the most impressive series Picasso ever devoted to a single child’ (ibid., p. 40). Spies continues: ‘If the children in the Blue and Rose periods were often only adjuncts of the adult world, and if Paulo’s comportment conformed to the expectations of a bourgeois family, Maya inspired Picasso to turn his full attention to children’s body language and mental world. Her birth […] marked a new chapter in his approach to the theme. His pictures entirely lost the ingratiating genre touch that evokes an idyllic state; the neo-classical paraphrases and depictions of children decked out in mythological cost.mes so prevalent since the 1920s became a thing of the past’ (ibid., p. 37). In their ‘freshness of vision and an unconditioned approach to representation’ (op. cit., 2022, p. 170) portraits of Maya from 1938-39 reveal the artist seeking direct inspiration from the joy and freedom of childhood. This is particularly evident in the present work, ‘composed of clearly demarcated zones of contrasting colour and pattern’ and ‘wilfully naïve in drawing and handling’ (ibid., p. 40).

Although quite diverse in style, Maya’s portraits, including the present work, are almost all the same in their compositional setup (figs. 3-5). They also almost invariably focus solely on Maya, depicting her in the privacy of her own world. As Elizabeth Cowling writes, ‘…the series is the brilliant high point of his portraiture of her. The composition of six of the paintings followed a standard pattern. Equipped with various toys, the child is seated on the floor of a nondescript room. As in Picasso’s contemporary paintings of adults, several angles are condensed in her face, with her profile (from the spectator’s point of view) to the right. The implied swivelling motion of her head is echoed in the jerky pivoting of her stumpy legs: she has described herself as a lifelong fidget, and Picasso captured her restlessness. The space evoked is shallow, the setting highly simplified, and Maya fills most of the canvas. The artist’s viewpoint is not from a dominant position above and looking down on her, but at her level, as her equal, as if he too were squatting on the floor, seeing the world as she experienced it’ (ibid., p. 39).

At the same t.mes , as with many of Picasso’s portraits executed throughout various stages of his career, the artist makes references to, and derives inspiration from, earlier art historical periods. Maya’s elaborate doll-like cost.mes s, her frontal pose and the directness of her gaze have prompted Robert Rosenblum to describe these portraits as ‘state occasions for which she would be as fancily posed and dressed as an infanta by Velázquez [fig. 6]’ (Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation, 1996, p. 373).

As well as drawing on the great art of the past, Picasso continued his own experiments with form in these pictures. The use of multiple angles within her face echoes Picasso depictions of her mother, Marie-Thérèse. This repetition - or the overlaying of identities within a single face - is a common feature of the works of the 1930s, allowing Picasso to explore his often complex private life (fig. 7). The present work as such reflects not only Picasso’s curiosity in capturing his daughter as her character and behaviour evolved over t.mes , but equally the role that she and her mother inhabited in Picasso’s personal universe. In a tender double portrait of Marie-Thérèse and Maya from the same year, Maternité (fig. 8), the two figures’ facial features are visibly alike, reinforcing the vision of the domesticated, intimate world that they represented for the artist.

A work of real importance, Fillette au bateau, Maya serves as a formal embodiment of how Maya ‘stimulated and amplified the artist’s fascination with childhood’ (op. cit., 2022, p. 12), helping strengthen his freedom from the conventions of representation and capture the unrestrained, youthful spirit that so often eludes adults. Fillette au bateau, Maya goes beyond a creative, playful depiction of the artist’s daughter, becoming a symbolic representation of his evolving relationship with his greatest muse Marie-Thérèse.