This drawing belongs to a small and fascinating series that Pablo Picasso made on the reverse of business cards belonging to his close friends Sebastià and Carles Junyer Vidal, who had inherited a prosperous yarn and stocking shop in Barcelona from their uncle. Sebastià, the elder brother, enjoyed some success as a painter and exhibited a group of Mallorcan landscapes at the Sala Parés in the autumn of 1902, then Barcelona’s most fashionable gallery. His younger brother Carles worked as an art and drama critic and founded the newspaper El Liberal, which published one of the earliest favourable appraisals of Picasso’s work in March 1904.

The two brothers — and Sebastià in particular — were constant companions of Picasso between 1902 and 1904. The artist spent long hours in the Junyer Vidal shop, talking with the proprietors and sketching on whatever materials were to hand, including their printed trade cards and sheets of wrapping paper. At this moment Picasso was chronically short of money, and he relied on the brothers’ hospitality and occasional financial help. In return he supplied them with drawings, many of them made spontaneously during these informal gatherings.

When Picasso left Barcelona for Paris in April 1904 it was Sebastià Junyer Vidal who accompanied him. For a short time, the two shared a studio at the Bateau-Lavoir before Junyer Vidal returned to Barcelona and gradually disappeared from Picasso’s circle. The drawings that Picasso made on the reverse of the Junyer Vidals’ business cards — more than thirty are known today — cover a wide range of subjects. Some depict the same huddled, impoverished figures that populate the artist’s Blue Period paintings, while others take the form of sardonic caricatures or scenes of overt sexuality.

The present drawing belongs naturally to the group of seated and crouching figures that Picasso explored in 1901 and 1902. These images ultimately derive from the studies of syphilitic prostitutes imprisoned at Saint-Lazare that Picasso made at the very beginning of his Blue Period. In their introspective stillness and closed, protective postures, such figures express the emotional tenor that would come to define his work of these years.

Nu Assist aux Bras Croisés (Seated Nude with Arms Crossed) relates closely to a well-known group of Blue Period compositions depicting seated or crouching women — figures that Picasso repeatedly used as archetypes of quiet endurance and suffering. Picasso began developing this imagery in Paris in the autumn of 1901 and continued it after his return to Barcelona in January 1902 (Zervos, vol. I, nos. 105, 119–121, 133, 160). Particularly comparable is a painting of a woman seated alone in the moonlight on a cold stone bench, her posture conveying an overwhelming sense of melancholy and passivity. The brooding expression and shadowed modelling of the face in that composition are echoed in the present drawing, as are the essential elements of the pose: shoulders hunched, arms tightly crossed, and knees drawn together in a closed, introspective stance.

The setting of the painting is Saint-Lazare, the women’s prison in Montmartre run by Dominican nuns. Many of the inmates had been incarcerated for offences connected with prostitution, and penitence formed a central element of their daily routine. Picasso was able to draw and paint the prisoners there free of charge, and the bleak circumstances of these women resonated strongly with the emotional atmosphere of his own life at the time. His financial situation and professional prospects were deteriorating, and he remained deeply affected by the suicide of his close friend Carles Casagemas earlier that year following a failed love affair. As the art historian John Richardson observed, the women of Saint-Lazare offered Picasso a subject that embodied his conflicted perception of sexuality — at once tender and ecstatic, yet also associated with guilt, suffering, and even death.

Through these recurring elements — the closed posture, the enveloping hood, and the austere architectural setting — Picasso developed a powerful visual language for the psychological intensity that defines the Blue Period.