Description of the underlying image
The couple takes up most of the surface of the canvas with no apparent spatial reference, as is the case of other works made during the same period. The male figure is short, has a healthy physique and wears a beard. His arms are raised in exclamation and he looks steadily forward with deep wide-open eyes. The woman is a brunette, with long hair and prominent breasts. The palms of her hands face down, and her left arm strategically covers the man’s genitals. Her eyes are closed and her head is slightly tilted towards her partner.
If the X-ray image proved revealing, the study made with infrared reflectography was even more so. This technique allowed researchers to reach the intermediate layers of the picture, triggering identification of a significant alteration to the female head. In a first study, the drawing appeared to be complete, in its definitive position and in keeping with the rest of the body; another partially completed face, however, is to be found slightly closer to the figure of the man.
As to the bodily structure, both figures evoke the drawings made in Paris late in 1902. Their features were created out of broad, free-flowing and highly textured impasto brushstrokes. From the marks made by a spatula or a similar tool that are visible in a large area of the upper left part of the canvas we may deduce that Picasso removed the excess pigment that was still fresh. In any event, such manipulation would affect the background, not the couple, as opposed to the procedure in The Blind Man’s Meal, in which Picasso removed paint from the whole pictorial surface.[1] The underlying picture of the couple may have already been too hard, or perhaps even completely dry, to be scratched out.[2]
[1] Lucy Belloli, ‘The Blind Man’s Meal’, in Gary Tinterow, Susan Alyson Stein (eds.), Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Yale University Press, 2010, p. 60.
[2] However, a mass of highly radioopaque colour applied with short thick brushstrokes suggest that the artist either used a previous canvas or else began to introduce a spatial reference beside the male figure.
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Summary