La Rêve (The Dream)

Pablo Picasso, then 50 years old is portraying his 22-year-old mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter here. Their relationship began when she was seventeen years old; he was 45 and still living with his first wife, Olga Khokhlova. It ended when Picasso moved on to his next mistress, artist Dora Maar, a surrealist photographer and model for Picasso, in 1935. Once, Walter and Maar met accidentally in Picasso's studio when he was painting Guernica. Asked about this in later life, Picasso remarked that he had been quite happy with the situation and that when they demanded that he choose between them, he told them that they would have to fight it out themselves, at which point the two women began to wrastle. Picasso described it "as one of his choicest memories. Whereas Picasso portrays Dora in his works of art as dark and in pain, as the "woman in tears", he painted Marie-Thérèse as just the opposite: blonde and bright.