©Pablo Picasso - The Absinthe Drinker. Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto 1903
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The Absinthe Drinker. Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto 1903
69x65cm oil/canvas
Private Collection
The image is only being used for informational and educational purposes
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From Christie's:
Angel Fernandez de Soto's friendship with Picasso is entwined in the very fabric of the early part of his career, his reputation, his myth. It was towards the end of the Nineteenth Century that Angel, a painter, and his brother Mateu, a sculptor, had met Picasso at the Cabaret Edén Concert. From the time of that introduction until the end of the Blue Period, Picasso would spend a vast amount of his time with one or other of the Soto brothers. On the streets of Barcelona, Angel and Picasso seemed like two dandies: Picasso would even share a pair of gloves with Angel in order to look more elegant, each of them keeping the unclothed hand concealed in a pocket. Angel sometimes worked as an extra in the theatre and Picasso told Richardson that this, and his access to costume, led to his frequent depictions of his friend as an urbane flâneur (Richardson, op. cit., 1991, p. 115). While he met them when still a teenager, Picasso's charisma and talent had already marked him out as something special, and they all became within a short time frequent visitors to Els Quatre Gats, fraternising with the earlier generation of Modernista artists. Still in his teens at the end of the Nineteenth Century, Picasso designed menus and brochures for Els Quatre Gats, and indeed is thought to have painted the sign that hung outside it, and would return there on his subsequent visits to Barcelona.