Even as he approached his 90th year, Picasso was still working at the
cutting edge of what painting could achieve. His work at this time acts as a
kaleidoscope, refracting 17th century subjects into a sparkling collage of
history and Modernism. This fabulous lithograph - produced by the legendary
Atelier Mourlot in Paris - is a beautiful, exquisitely detailed example of what
Picasso's biographer John Richardson called the artist's "monumental
apotheosis".

Although an avowedly Modern artist, Picasso had profound respect for the Old Masters, and used their work to feed his own. Richardson explained that “in old age, Picasso would admit to being very conscious of old masters breathing down his neck. Far from being bothered by this, he was so secure in his genius that he conjured master after master into the heart of his work and had his way with them” [A Life of Picasso: The Early Years, London, 1992, vol. 1, p. 185]. During the 1950s he'd locked horns with Delacroix's Women of Algiers and Velazquez's masterpiece Las Meninas, reimagining them in over seventy audacious paintings. From 1959-62 he produced around forty variations on Manet's Le déjeuner sur l’herbe. Time and again, he returned to the work of his favourite artists, turning it inside out and transforming it into his own, as though he were absorbing its power.

As the 1960s progressed, Picasso felt the weight of one artist's legacy in particular. Rembrandt was a figure with whom he could identify closely; they had each had enjoyed long careers, led incredible advances in the development of painting, and distinguished themselves as draughtsmen of genius. Like Picasso, Rembrandt had also enjoyed inserting himself into his work in various guises. His influence would have to be reckoned with sooner or later. During a period of convalescence after surgery at the end of 1965, Picasso took time out from painting to re-read a number of literary classics, including The Three Musketeers by Dumas. He also watched a lot of TV, particularly shows centred around the romantic exploits of courtly knights. These interests all came together, and in the spring of 1966 the stage was set for a new character to make his swaggering entrance into the artist's world.

The musketeer is unquestionably the dominant presence in Picasso's final works. Age was catching up with him, but these swashbuckling figures remained virile, exuberant and dashing. Slippery and multifaceted, they're impossible to pin down. Picasso would give them individual personalities. The novelist and critic Hélène Parmelin described how he would point to different paintings in turn and remark, “With this one you’d better watch out. That one makes fun of us. That one is enormously satisfied. This one is a grave intellectual. And that one - look how sad he is, the poor guy. He must be a painter...” [quoted in Picasso: Tradition and Avant-Garde, exh. cat., Museo del Prado, Madrid, 2006, p. 340]. During the next seven years the musketeers would appear in more than four hundred images, some of which are veiled self-portraits of Picasso himself. It's no coincidence that many of them are holding pipes; a lifelong smoker, the artist had been obliged to give up tobacco following his surgery in 1965.

The pinnacle of Picasso's obsession with the musketeer came in the autumn of 1968, when he produced a group of portraits unparalleled in their beauty, inventiveness and intensity. Le Cavalier (Mousquetaire à la pipe) was one of these images. Painted on 13th October 1968, it's a particularly vivid example of what makes these works so exceptional. Here, Picasso has taken the ornate collar and cuffs, sumptuous velvet and brilliant plumed hat of his character and splintered them into a jewel-like collage of pure colour and rich brushwork. It's an image of supreme self-confidence and panache. Filling the entire canvas, this musketeer is a larger than life figure who can barely be contained by the image. It's no surprise that Picasso chose to have it produced as a lithograph by Henri Deschamps, his most trusted collaborator at the Atelier Mourlot.

Whenever Picasso required a painting to be interpreted as a lithograph, he turned to Deschamps. This laborious process involved reproducing each tiny detail of the painted surface on a stone or metal plate. With its rich, painterly aesthetic, Le Cavalier (Mousquetaire à la pipe) was especially difficult to replicate. Looking closely at the musketeer's face gives some idea of the work involved. In this small area of the composition, a flurry of tiny marks suggests the textured surface of the thick grey paint Picasso had applied to his canvas; five separate layers were used to create this effect, each of which would have been drawn by hand onto its own lithographic plate before being printed. This technique would have been employed across the whole picture, in as many layers as it took to capture the essence of the original painting. Picasso demanded the best and would accept nothing less.

At first glance, a 17th century musketeer might seem an odd subject for an artist working in 1968. This was the year of the Prague Spring, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. The first moon landing was less than a year away. Pop Art was enjoying its golden age, and Minimalism was on the march. The prevailing currents in the art world were moving towards a linear evolution of style, emotional distance, and non-figuration. In this context, Picasso's final works seemed hopelessly old fashioned. His earlier work had often confronted universal human concerns, but in his final years he devoted himself to entirely personal subject matter. In an age of extraordinary progress and upheaval, the world's greatest living artist appeared to have retreated three hundred years into the past.

In reality, Picasso's choice was entirely in keeping with his lifelong search for complete artistic freedom. Rather than paint what the world expected, he was determined to work on his own terms. As always, rules were there to be broken. Far from a retreat, Picasso's final images represented a new frontier in painting, one that other artists would only catch up to years later. By the 1980s, a new generation of painters had emerged, one that embraced the subjectivity, spontaneity and aggressive honesty that Picasso had caught on canvas over a decade earlier. In this context, his late work assumed a central role in the development of painting. For the better part of a century he had shown the way forward, and he continued to do so right until the end.

Le Cavalier (Mousquetaire à la pipe) is an exceptional tribute to this
magical period in Picasso’s life.

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