There is a photo that also links Marie-Thérèse to the bather series, but somewhat bizarrely it appears to post-date a similar painting. Picasso often derived paintings from photographs but the reverse is uncommon. The painting titled Bather with a Ball is usually dated 1929 (perhaps wrongly) and the photograph, which is inscribed on the back Juan-les-Pins 1932, appears to be taken three years later (Figs.8-9).

Just prior to producing the ‘pinheaded’ bather paintings in 1928 that featured Marie-Thérèse’s coded presence, Picasso produced two sketchbooks containing imagined sculptures. The first of these sketchbooks was produced in Cannes in 1927 and unequivocally demonstrates the way in which his muse’s physical presence sexualised his creative output from 1927 onwards. And in some cases more by absence than presence. In the summer of that year Picasso and family decamped to Cannes for what had become the obligatory summer vacation to the South of France so that Olga could mix with the glitterati and the many Russian aristocrats, who although stateless still attempted to recreate the belle epoch in Cannes’ glamorous hotels. Picasso on the other hand was soon overcome by anguish, no doubt caused by his separation form his newly found nubile love, and this found expression in his sketchbooks, which he filled with sexually charged images. Richardson described many of these as “the femmes phallus of Cannes who look as if made of “erectile tissue,” ” or as “ithyphallic women extending ithyphallic arms” (Richardson 1985). These drawings coincided with their first extended period of separation and blatantly express Picasso’s desire to personify and possess to the extent of intertwining their sexual personas, in the form of the femmes Phallus (Fig.10). Many of the femmes phallus are depicted at the moment of placing a key into the lock of a beach hut (Fig.11).