This linocut portrait presents Pablo Picasso’s enduring muse and wife, Jacqueline Roque, rendered with a quiet psychological intensity that characterises much of his work from the early 1960s. Created in 1964, Jacqueline Lisant captures the sitter in a moment of introspection: her head rests on her hand, eyes lowered, as if absorbed in private thought. The composition is intimate and frontal, yet emotionally contained, suggesting both closeness and distance—an emotional duality that recurs throughout Picasso’s late portraits of Jacqueline.

The stark contrasts of the linocut medium heighten the expressive power of the image. Picasso exploits the graphic potential of black and white, carving bold, angular lines that define Jacqueline’s facial planes, heavy eyelids, and elongated nose. These simplified yet forceful forms echo Picasso’s lifelong engagement with Cubism, while the softened contours and rhythmic carving lines lend the figure a meditative calm. The textured surface, achieved through varied cutting and inking, gives the portrait a tactile, almost sculptural presence despite its flatness.

Printed on Arches paper, the work exemplifies Picasso’s mastery of printmaking in his later years, when he increasingly turned to linocut as a means of achieving immediacy and formal clarity. This impression is an épreuve d’artiste, aside from the standard edition of 50, underscoring its rarity and close connection to the artist’s own working process. Signed in pencil, Jacqueline Lisant stands as a poignant and personal image—both a study of a beloved subject and a distilled expression of Picasso’s late style, where emotional depth is conveyed through radical simplicity.