This is one of a group of studies and unfinished compositions of figures of a youth on which Picasso worked in the spring of 1906 in Paris and then in the summer of that year in Spain. The Hermitage gouache is typical of the late Rose Period, when the artist's works began to reveal a tendency towards geometricisation and a stress on the structural basis of his images.
The youth's face is enclosed; the artist's attention is focussed on the plastic expressiveness of the figure, in the treatment of which we can feel reminiscences of the Antique. At the same time Picasso is perhaps closer to pre-classical Antiquity, a time of search for new forms. Picasso himself was in just such a state of search. The energetic contour acts in harmony with the volume it encloses and brings out all the inner tension and movement of the calm figure. A combination of basic elements living in complex interaction - stability and inconstancy, harmony and disharmony, calm and tension - was central to Picasso's approach.