Picasso loved animals – perhaps even more so than humans – and he held goats in particularly high regard. He had multiple pet goats, including one that he won in a local village lottery on the Côte d'Azur, and another that he was lovingly gifted by his wife Jaqueline Roque in the 1950s. The latter was promptly named Esmerelda and she lived together with Picasso and Roque inside their home, sleeping just outside Picasso’s bedroom door. When discussing the close relationship with his four-legged friend, Picasso joked: “but you know, she’s afraid of the dark and if she wakes up and she doesn’t know where I am, she gets frightened, so I keep her close by.”
Goats in various forms proliferated Picasso’s work across his oeuvre; in sculpture, ceramic, print and paint, varying from mimetic representation to playful abstractions in his later years. An unwavering source of inspiration, Picasso combined his passion for antiquity with the goat motif, and it often emerges as a faun in his artwork inspired by ancient mythology. Thus, through both the traditional medium of clay – harking back to the ancient Greeks who were pioneers of pottery – Picasso probed classical sources in order to explore the tension between hunter and hunted, man and beast, friend or foe. Unlike his brutish Minotaur – often thought to represent the artist’s and by extension, mankind’s emotional polarities – Picasso’s goats and fauns appear in cheerful, colourful variations. Finding an unusual affinity with the goat’s unruly behaviour, Tête de chèvre de profil is a light-hearted representation of one of Picasso’s closest and most private relationships: that with his favourite animal, the goat.
