Aurélia Engel has confirmed the authenticity of this work, which can be found in Françoise Gilot's archives under number 958.

Françoise Gilot, born 1921, is a French painter, and is known as a companion of Pablo Picasso.

She was raised in Paris by her father, a businessman, and her mother, a watercolorist. She studied English Literature at Cambridge University and the British Institute in Paris (now University of London Institute in Paris). While training as a lawyer, Gilot was known to skip morning law classes to feed her true passion: art. Despite her mother being an artist herself, the extent of the young woman's artistic pursuits inexplicably drove her away from immediate family to her grandmother's attic.

At 21, Gilot met Picasso, then 61, and would ultimately raise both their children: Claude and Paloma. The children's antics were often captured on the canvases of their parents. Gilot maintained a relationship with the Spanish painter from 1944 until 1953. Eleven years after their separation Gilot wrote Life with Picasso, a book that sold over one million copies in dozens of languages.

In 1969, Gilot was introduced to Jonas Salk, the polio vaccine pioneer, at the home of mutual friends in La Jolla, California. Their shared appreciation of architecture led to a brief courtship, and they were married in 1970 in Paris. Gilot remained married to Dr. Salk until his death in 1995, and during her marriage she continued painting in New York, California, and Paris. At 87, Gilot's vibrant, colorful art continues to reflect her thoughts on nature, time, symbols and signs.

"When I do sign a painting, I often make my signature rather typographic because I want it to be as neutral as possible." Adding her signature to a painting has always been a problem for Gilot. In her earlier years, as a painter, she was not eager to sign her work. She felt that the signature, by introducing additional forms and colors, however small and peripheral, would disrupt the rhythms she had established so carefully in the composition. In 1978, Gilot designed a new signature monogram, a circular chop mark that she began to use to sign many of her canvases.

Her stature as an artist and the value of her work has increased over the years. In 2021 her painting "Paloma à la Guitare", a 1965 portrait of her daughter, sold for $1.3 million at Sotheby's in London. As of January 2022, her work has been on exhibit in multiple leading museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Centre Pompidou. At Christie's in Hong Kong, her artwork entitled "Living Forest," an abstract canvas created in 1977, also sold for $1.3 million.

Francoise Gilot's career lasted eight decades, amassing a body of work comprising 1,600 paintings and 3,600 works on paper. Gilot explained, ""I always knew what I wanted to say, it was how to say it".

The artist passed away in 2023 at the age of 101. She had continued to work as a painter seizing form and color, a visual statement that is at once both personal and universal until close to the end of her life. She was not content with the known; she viewed her task as an artist to transform and extend perceptions and to stimulate viewers towards new insights and experiences. In Gilot’s most recent paintings, the forces of nature, time and space were her preoccupations. Gilot’s own explorations and achievements as an artist demonstrate how the vitality of a tradition can be maintained while simultaneously moving forward into the uncharted territories of the art world continuum.