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©Pablo Picasso - Saltimbanque in Profile 1905

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From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City:
Consummately assured, this work may be one of Picasso's last pictures depicting the itinerant acrobats called saltimbanques. The palette and serene mood link it to the "Family of Saltimbanques" (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), completed in late 1905. As with "The Actor", hanging to the right, Picasso borrowed the pose and hands from a work by the Neoclassical master Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (Comte de Pastoret, 1823-26, The Art Institute of Chicago), who had himself borrowed the pose from Bronzino's sixteenth-century Portrait of a Young Man, now at the Metropolitan Museum (29.100.16).
Picasso originally made the head of the young performer appear much more sculptural, with deeply cut curls and heavily lidded eyes. It is likely that, in the early 1920s, the Parisian dealer Paul Guillaume had the picture "washed" to soften its appearance prior to its sale to the American publisher and collector Scofield Thayer.