Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Beret dear..£50m Picasso
Spanish artist’s masterpiece achieves UK record at auction
A PICASSO masterpiece has sold for almost £50million, setting a UK record.
Femme au Beret et a la Robe Quadrillee has been in the same private collection since the Spanish artist’s death in 1973.
After a battle by four overseas bidders it went for £49.8million, the most expensive painting sold in sterling at auction.
Harry Smith of art acquisition firm Gurrs John, which won it for a client, said: “The market has a fairly regular supply of Picassos, but it’s THIS is one of the greatest portraits by Picasso to appear on the market in recent years.
The depiction of Marie-therese from the 1930s, painted the same year as Weeping Woman, reveals his mastery of the modern portrait.
Of all of the artist’s styles and decades, this is the one that most rare to see a painting as special and as fresh to the market.”
The 1937 oil painting depicts Pablo Picasso’s mistress Marietherese Walter. He made it soon after his mural-sized Guernica.
Sotheby’s in London said it was a “thrill” to see it “achieve a new benchmark” on Wednesday.
It beat the £49.5million record set by Massacre of the Innocents, by Peter Paul Rubens, in 2002. Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi holds the world record, selling for the equivalent of £335million at auction in New York last year. epitomises his legacy as a portraitist of women, with this particular painting encompassing all the key elements for which he’s celebrated.