Portrait of Suzanne Bloch is an oil on canvas painting executed by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso in Paris in 1904, towards the end of his Blue Period. The subject, Suzanne Bloch, was a singer known for her Wagner interpretations, and the sister of the violinist Henri Bloch. The painting is housed in the São Paulo Museum of Art. Background A luminary in the Parisian sets frequented by Picasso at the beginning of the 20th century, Suzanne Bloch was a Wagnerian singer and the sister of the violinist Henri Bloch. She was introduced to the Spanish artist by the French poet Max Jacob, in 1904, and she sat for a portrait by Picasso in his Bateau-Lavoir studio at 13 rue Ravignan in Paris, between the late spring and early summer of that year. A pen and ink sketch heightened with gouache, and signed and dated by Picasso, preceded the oil painting; it is now conserved at the Neubury Coray collection, in Ascona, Switzerland. Description The portrait in oils has been described by Luiz Marques, professor of art history at Unicamp, as exemplary of "the blue period, to which it fully belongs." It has been called the last important work of the blue period, although Palau i Fabre says that it is "difficult to date and determine the stage of transition from one period to the other—which in any case was not a sudden shift but a gently nuanced, though intermittent, progress". In a similar vein, Denys Chevalier has written: "Any attempt... to date the blue period too precisely can only lead to errors". The painting, fully imbued with a somber, melancholy aura, is rendered in monochromatic shades, varying from blue to blue-green, with the sporadic presence of warmer tones. Nevertheless, it is possible to notice that the painting already announces some characteristics of a future transition in the Spanish painter's pictorial style, foreshadowing Cubism. In the words of Camesasca, quoted by Marques: "[…] this portrait is marked by the emergence of a reflection about the plastic-chromatic structure of Cézanne’s works, in the scope of a 'post-impressionism, already absorbed in the problems which will make the art explode." Provenance The painting belonged to Suzanne Bloch, and was sold by her heirs after her death. The Thannhauser Gallery, Munich, sold the painting to Sally Falk, Mannheim, but his collection was already dispersed in 1919, under the supervision of the Paul Cassirer Gallery,