Inès assise

This elaborate, highly worked drawing is a portrait of one of the most constant women in Pablo Picasso’s life, Inès Sassier. The artist’s housekeeper, trusted friend, and confidante, Sassier remained by the artist’s side for more than three decades. Throughout this period, she watched as the artist navigated between relationships, moving from his first wife, Olga Kholkova, to Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Maar, before Françoise Gilot entered and, ten years later, exited his life, and Jacqueline Roque took her place as the artist’s final great love and muse. Dedicated and dated ‘Pour Inès Picasso Le Vallauris le 23 juillet 1954’ this work is one of a number of portraits that Picasso made especially for Sassier.

At the time that he created the present portrait, Picasso was living in Vallauris in the south of France, together with Gilot and their young children, Claude and Paloma. Picasso’s daughter with Walter, Maya Widmaier Picasso, recognised the place that Sassier sat for this portrait. The artist asked her to pose against the inlaid Moorish chest of drawers traditionally cherished by his children as a backdrop for the family’s Christmas tree. The swirling, ornamental pattern provides a striking background to the intensely gazing, seated portrait of Sassier. Gilot recalled, ‘She was very pretty at that time. She had an oval face with a small nose, black hair and eyes, and olive-brown skin… Every year, for her birthday, around Christmas time, Pablo had her come to pose one afternoon for a portrait sketch and gave it to her, so that by now she must have twenty or more portraits by Picasso’ (quoted in Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 164). 

Picasso met Sassier in the summer of 1936, when he was holidaying in Mougins in the south of France with his then lover Maar. The couple were staying at the Hôtel Vaste Horizon, where Sassier was working as a chambermaid with her sister. ‘She was beautiful. She was kind,’ Picasso recalled (quoted in Brassaï, Conversations with Picasso, Chicago, 1999, p. 156). Picasso asked her to return to Paris to work for him. She agreed, and a year later moved into his apartment on the rue des Grands-Augustins. When war broke out, she returned home to the south. It was at this time that she met Gustave Sassier, whom she married. She returned with her husband to Paris to work for Picasso in the spring of 1942, and moved into a small apartment below the artist’s rooms and studio. From then on she never left the artist. When Picasso relocated to the south of France following the war, Sassier travelled between Paris and Vallauris, before relocating permanently to Mougins when the artist moved there. ‘As far as I was concerned, there was only him,’ she said. ‘Picasso was first and foremost before the whole world’ (quoted in A. Huffington, Picasso – Creator and Destroyer, London, 1988, p. 409).

Together with the artist’s old friend and secretary, Jaime Sabartés, Sassier was an essential part of Picasso’s daily life. Her presence in wartime Paris was also important for Marie-Thérèse and Maya, who lived nearby on the boulevard Henri IV. Maya particularly remembered her as an important part of her childhood.

Picasso’s portrayal of Sassier in the present Inès assise is instantly reminiscent of the drawings of the artist’s great rival and friend, Henri Matisse. Throughout their careers, both artists kept careful watch of the others’ work, keen that one did not outdo the other. Capturing his sitters in often highly decorative settings, Matisse’s pencil and charcoal portrait drawings are some of his most famous works. In addition, the ornate, richly decorated setting of Inès assise is reminiscent of Matisse’s odalisques of the 1920s, which were similarly pictured in opulent, pattern-filled interiors.