Image: Image reproduction rights managed by Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio; institutional source link provided
View source →Head of a Boy
Pablo Picasso, 1905–6
Technical Details
Medium
Possibly tempera on board
Dimensions
Sheet: 24.6 x 18.6 cm (9 11/16 x 7 5/16 in.)
Style
Rose Period figuration
Decade
1900s
About This Work
The official Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio record identifies Head of a Boy as a Pablo Picasso artwork, dated 1905–6, in Possibly tempera on board. Created during Pablo Picasso's Rose Period (1904–6), this drawing features a warm palette and thin delicate lines. It might have been created during a summer that Picasso spent in Gósol, a Catalan village in the Spanish Pyrenees. The sheet presents an adolescent with pensive lips, almond-shaped eyes, and a dreamy expression—all characteristics that recur throughout the artist's depictions of figures around this time. Picasso began with a layer of pink opaque paint, allowing the color to give the boy's skin a warm tone that contrasts with the gray used to delineate his head. The subject's skull and jaw were then carefully modeled using a darker tone in roughly applied marks. The close-up view—stark in the present drawing—was later reused in Picasso's 1906 painting <em>The Two Brothers</em> (Kunstmuseum Basel), in which a nude adolescent carries a young boy on his back.
Head of a Boy is grouped here under Rose Period for gallery navigation based on the date published by Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio. This period label is interpretive context, not a replacement for the cited primary object record. The holding collection is documented by the cited institutional source.
Current Location
Valuation & Provenance
2026 Estimated Value
Public collection / market value not asserted
* Estimates are based on comparable auction results and market analysis. Not a formal appraisal.
Last Known Sale
No public auction record — held in permanent museum collection
Keywords
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