The connection between Picasso’s art and the women in his life is well documented. From the early portraits of Olga and the 1930s depictions of Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Maar, to the later works inspired by Jacqueline, they are among his principle sources of inspiration. The same is true of this elegant and striking portrait of Sara Murphy, a woman who for a brief period counted among the artist's most important muses.

Sara Murphy met Picasso in the autumn of 1921. She and her husband Gerald had emigrated to Paris earlier that year and were taking painting classes under the tutelage of Natalia Goncharova (Gerald would become a respected artist in his own right). Charming and cosmopolitan, they were soon at the centre of European artistic circles, counting Stravinsky, Diaghilev and Tristan Tzara among their acquaintances. They also became a focal point for other American expatriates; Cole Porter (who had known Gerald at Yale) was a close friend, as were Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Indeed, the Murphys are rumoured to have been the inspiration for main characters in Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel Tender is the Night.

The Murphys' arrival in the South of France was instrumental in cementing it as a place to be, and to be seen. During the glamourous interwar years, their beach parties and picnics were legendary (fig. 3), and Sara was the centre of this entertainment, often pictured in extravagant cost.mes or wearing her pearls – she always claimed the sun was good for them. By 1923, when the present work was executed, they had become close friends with Picasso and Olga, spending that summer together in Antibes (fig. 1). Yet for many years, the connection between them was unknown; the woman who features in Picasso’s neoclassical images of the 1920s was always presumed to be Olga, and it was not until the 1990s that Sara’s identity was confirmed. As William Rubin wrote of this important breakthrough: ‘The Murphy’s daughter, Honoria, and the family’s close friends had always known that Sara appeared in a few of Picasso’s 1923 drawings [...]. No one, however, suspected the existence of almost 40 oil paintings, nor the more than 200 drawings of Sara that we can now identify’ (W. Rubin, op. cit., p. 140). There is nothing to suggest a romantic attachment between them, yet evidently Picasso must have fallen under the spell of this energetic, poised and beautiful woman.

Sara has been identified as the subject of one Picasso’s most important works of this period, his Femme en blanche (fig. ), yet Rubin also argues that she was in fact the inspiration for other key works that were long thought to be portraits of Olga (fig. 5). There are definite similarities between the two woman, but the confluence of their identities is emphasised by Picasso’s approach to portraiture. As Rubin wrote in the introduction to his major exhibition of Picasso’s portraiture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (fig. 6), ‘Picasso's portraiture casts the very concept of identity into doubt; it is no longer fixed, but mutable. Caught in the flux of the artist's passion for metamorphosis, the images and identities of his real-life subjects continuously dissolve and re-form. Many of these transitory conceptions are not, of course, "portraits" in the received genre sense of the word, though they are clearly portrayals […]. Painted mostly from memory, Picasso's portrait subjects were largely imaged not as seen, but as conceptualized, in a variety of figural modes. Picasso invented or reinvented the abstract, surreal, classical, and expressionist portrait types as we know them in twentieth century art. He did not wholly abandon realism, but ceased to give it a privileged role in the portrait's definition. (quoted in Exh. Cat., Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation, op. cit., pp. 13-14).

The women who appear in the portraits of this period are idealised, archetypal figures. Picasso’s neoclassicism, which reflected the wider artistic rappel a l’ordre in the years following the First World War, harked back to a previous era and its inhabitants, men and women alike, are imbued with a quasi-mythological status. Yet, whilst for some artists this return to a more traditional form of representation was a conservative move, typically for Picasso it is underpinned by the same impulse that drove his Cubist experiments - a need to interrogate and understand the complex relationship between life and the mirror we hold up to it in art.

The present work is a prime example of this. Rubin notes that it, ‘was obviously based on the image of Sara in a photograph showing her arm in arm with Picasso on the beach [fig. 2]. Picasso, not surprisingly, had kept a print of this image’ (ibid., p. 55). Picasso may have worked from this photograph, or from his memory of this photograph, yet it has all the vivacity and immediacy of a drawing made in front of its subject. The lines are strong, certain and quick, conveying a powerful sense of personality. The turban clearly has basis in reality (as in the photograph), although it has the effect of emphasising the Ingres-esque classicism of the work. Rubin noted that: ‘In 1922-23 Picasso’s classical figures become freer and more fluid in posture, cost.mes and coiffure. His drawing is more lyrical, his modeling softer and looser […]. This stylistic change provides the vehicle for a new sense of ineffable tenderness in Picasso’s Neoclassical works of 1922-23, but the shift in emotional tenor also seems to correspond to changes in the artist’s life’ (ibid., p. 45). The result in this instance, is a compelling portrait that offers an insight into Picasso’s life and art during this distinctive moment of his career.