[TheGrifter]

According to his friend and dealer Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, Picasso improvised around the accident precisely the way Rembrandt was thought to have done in his free-form “sketchpad” plates, some of which anthologized different images of his wife, Saskia. “I said to myself: it’s ruined,” Picasso noted. “I’m going to do any old thing on it. I began to scribble. It became Rembrandt.” The doodle did turn into Rembrandt’s face, though in all likelihood it wasn’t quite the pure accident that Picasso made it out to be.

Because his plate of the Marie-Thérèses recalls the Saskias, he was probably, at some level, thinking of Rembrandt before he’d even begun. But, once Rembrandt was summoned, he and Picasso became one and the same. Rembrandt’s face on that etching grafts him in the prime of his smiling self-congratulation—complete with curly whiskers and feathered beret—onto the puffier, double-chinned visage of Picasso’s own middle age.