A playful and inventive masterwork, Pablo Picasso’s La famille de Piero Crommelynck depicts the legendary master printmaker Piero Crommelynck with his wife and daughter, a family with which Picasso was close throughout the 1960s and until the artist’s death in 1973. Drawn with a sense of energetic virtuosity in graphite, the present lot demonstrates the talents of Picasso as an expert draughtsman. Articulated with subtly indicated facial expressions and the intimately interior space, with its built-up areas of decorative pattern, the drawing exhibits the brilliance of Picasso as both storyteller and portraitist.

Picasso met Crommelynck in printmaker Roger Lacourière’s atelier while working on his Suite Vollard. Later, in the 1960s, the Crommelynck family moved to Mougins, close to Picasso’s villa Notre-Dame-de-Vie where he was living at this time. During these years, Crommelynck and his brother Aldo provided Picasso with the copper plates that he would use in his Trois cent quarante-sept gravures, La Célestine and the final Cent cinquante-six gravures graphic series. Crommelynck’s portrait can be found in a number of drawings and prints executed by Picasso during this time; however, the present lot is unique in its depiction of the master printer and his family. In La famille de Piero Crommelynck, he is depicted looking over at his wife and daughter, rendered with his characteristic goatee. His wife looks adoringly back at him, while his daughter maintains eye contact with the viewer via a simple smile. The gaze of Picasso’s subjects imbues the work with a sense of energy characteristic of the artist’s masterpieces on paper.