The pseudo-historic Queen Isabeau, a direct descendant of the family of images belonging to the transformed “bistro carnival”, is semantically equivalent to Harlequin (one of the carnival group), who reappeared in Picasso’s works after a three-year absence. This pensive female Harlequin in her green, leaf-patterned dress and with her pseudo-medieval headdress is accompanied by a bowl in a vegetal form, “gothically” heaped with fruit. The allusion to natural forms serves as a metaphor of the eternal woman, in this case dressed as a medieval “fair lady”.

The figure, the stylised arabesques and flat planes, the cool and somewhat mournful decorativeness, give the picture the quality of old tapestries, which Picasso found attractive because of their combination of generalised forms and chromatically graded tones. For Picasso sleep and dream are also elements of the eternal woman, but in this case Harlequin-Isabeau’s pensive reverie over a book suggests the character’s literary past.

Another fair lady, but of a different era, is depicted in Woman with a Fan, in whom some of Picasso’s contemporaries recognised an American connoisseur of art. However the resemblance was accidental, even though the painting definitely has something of an actual portrait about it. An elegant woman, wearing a rather audacious hat and a jabot and holding an open fan in one hand and a folded umbrella in the other, sits in an armchair as if posing for the artist. Notwithstanding the obviously new pictorial language of the canvas, all its formal solutions have a wonderful unity that makes one forget the unorthodox manner and react only to the image, its individual expression. The pictorial space—satiated with the interplay of rhythmic planes, graded tonal perspectives and cold malachite and silvery-grey colours—is an attribute of the personality we read in the woman’s features. Her fixed, sober gaze from under the brim of her enormous hat hypnotises the viewer; her face, though somewhat generalised, retains its regularity of feature and is treated like a mask, cut and polished by light; the gesture of her hand, holding the umbrella, is both angular and affectedly refined; her entire figure reflects the fashionable style of a woman of the world, a sister of Alexander Blok’s mysterious “Unknown Lady” (that was how the Russian Symbolist Georgy Chulkov perceived her).[27]

If, however, Harlequin-Isabeau’s inclined head, downcast eyes and pseudo-historical details created the image of a queen from some romantic dreamland, what Chulkov calls a charming monster, then in this other lady we have two strains, differing in expression, two different halves of one mask. This combination of contemporary urban style with awkward, almost sharp rhythms lacking in plasticity creates the image of a mannequin with no more substance than what the eye can see, rather than that of eternal woman. And while Queen Isabeau’s femininity was emphasised and expressed by the metaphor of plentiful vegetal allusions (the leafy ornament, the full fruit dish, the emerald green tonality), here the pictorial element characterising the woman with a fan is an empty, jagged vase.