Bust of Woman with Hat was made in 1964, deep in what Picasso's biographer John Richardson called "L'Époque Jacqueline" — the final chapter of his life defined almost entirely by his wife and muse, Jacqueline Roque. He made more than 400 portraits of her, more than any other subject in his career, and her distinctive features — dark eyes, high cheekbones, classical profile — became the raw material through which he continuously reinvented his late style. The hat is a recurring motif: Jacqueline frequently wore fanciful, wide-brimmed hats, and Picasso used them as compositional anchors, their bold forms giving structure to the Cubist fragmentation of her face. The result here is characteristic of his mid-1960s work — vivid, chromatic, and formally daring.

This is an original lithograph from an authorized estate edition, produced after Picasso's death. As one observer noted of these Jacqueline portraits, "you see the transformation of his late style only through them" — making this not just a portrait of a woman, but a record of an artist at the height of his final creative evolution.