Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler

In the autumn of 1910 Pablo Picasso painted the man who was buying almost everything he made. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler was a young German dealer in Paris who had staked his gallery on Cubism when few others would, and this portrait comes at the most extreme point of that experiment. Kahnweiler sat for it something like 30 times, and yet he is hard to find in the shimmer of small tilted planes. Look for the clasped hands low in the centre, the wave of hair, and the hint of a watch chain, and the seated figure slowly assembles itself out of the grey and brown facets. A few years later the First World War would scatter this circle, and Kahnweiler, still a German citizen, had his stock seized by the French state.