Woman with a hat and fur collar (Marie-Thérèse Walter), painted in Paris in 1937, is one of the numerous portraits that Pablo Picasso made of Marie-Thérèse Walter, his sentimental companion between 1927 and 1935, and mother of his daughter Maya. In this portrait, Picasso performs an exhaustive analytical exercise in which the youth and personality of Marie-Thérèse undergo a thousand metamorphic figurations. The artist turns the model into an icon of sensuality through a rich pictorial language in which the distortion of forms supposes the consolidation of the so-called "Picasso style". The portrait constitutes at the same time the epilogue of the confrontation between the two essential models of that moment, Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Maar. Picasso shows here Marie-Thérèse much more conventional and without drama. In spite of the distortion of form, the divergence of the gaze and the angularity of the physiognomic features, this portrait is easily identifiable, since, like the ones made at the same time by Nusch, the second wife of Paul Éluard, and of Dora Maar, retains the essential features of the portrayed.
This painting measures 61 x 50 cm and is housed in the National Art Museum of Catalonia, Barcelona.
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