Im Lapin Agile

The Lapin Agile was a shabby, beloved cabaret up in Montmartre where poor young artists drank on credit, and around 1905 Picasso, then in his early twenties, painted this to hang on its wall. He put himself into it, dressed as a harlequin in diamond-patterned motley, nursing a drink and staring past the woman beside him. In the back corner, playing his guitar, sits Frédé, the owner who ran the place and let the artists linger. The woman in red is Germaine Pichot, from Picasso's Paris circle. This belongs to his Rose Period, warmer in colour than the blue years just behind him. The painting hung in the cabaret for years before it left, eventually selling at auction in 1989 for a sum that would have astonished everyone in that room.