EST:£73.5M SOLD:£84.6M

PAINTED in 1905, this Pablo Picasso work, Fillette à la Corbeille Fleurie, was bought the same year by collector Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo.

Their purchase, along with two other so-called Rose Period paintings, is credited with jump- starting the Spanish artist’s career.

It is said to portray the themes with which Picasso would wrestle all his life — love, sex, beauty, tenderness and violence. The model was a teenage flower seller who also posed for Modigliani and Van Dongen.

It remained in the Stein collection until 1968, when it was bought by the Rockefellers for less than $1 million. It had pride of place in the library of their 65th Street New York home.

Its anonymous sale on Tuesday made it the second most expensive Picasso to sell at auction, after the £132 million Les Femmes d’Alger (version ‘O’) in 2015.