An individual has acquired this Thursday the work ‘Father and son on the shores of the sea’, an original drawing by Pablo Ruiz-Picasso around 1900, at an auction organized by Subastas Subastas.
The work on lot 582 has been sold to a private individual by the starting price of 80,000 euros plus 20% commissionalthough it had a sale estimate of 200,000 euros.
The work had aroused the interest of the Generalitat of Catalonia, which visited it twice, according to Subarna Subastas, since it is a similar work to the one that was awarded to the Generalitat itself in October and which was transferred to the Picasso Museum of Barcelona, although it has finally ended up in a private individual without even the State’s trial.
Both public and private institutions had been called to bid for this ink drawing and colored pencilswhich is part of the fifty works that Picasso developed at the beginning of the 20th century on the business cards of the haberdashery that his friends, the brothers Carles and Sebastià Junyer-Vidal, had on Calle Argenteria in Barcelona.
During Picasso’s visits to the Junyer-Vidal brothers’ establishment, the artist shared a table with them, but he also took the opportunity to draw on the cards provided by his friends. At that time, Picasso did not give them more importance and did not sign the drawings, so the owners were the ones who signed it; hence, the spelling differs from those drawings that Picasso did later sign at the request of these brothers, as reported by Subarna.
The motifs of male duets in Picasso’s work began to be more frequent from ‘The Mistletoe Seller’ (1902-1903), passing through ‘The Tragedy’ (1903), and some of the same aspects are found in the way of grouping the figure of the father and the child against a sea background from ‘Father and son by the sea’.