Early Picasso was propped up against bedroom wall

Published on Monday 31 March 2008 20:39

A RARE Pablo Picasso painting showing the artist in a lover's clinch was found lying in a bedroom alongside two other important works, an auction house said yesterday.

The early watercolour was found propped up against a bedroom wall in the West Country alongside two equine paintings by British painters George Stubbs and Alfred Munnings.

The anonymous seller is believed to be a member of a foreign royal family and the pieces are expected to fetch at least 100,000 each when they go under the hammer next week.

Etreinte is a rare early painting of Picasso with his lover, and Munnings's The Irish Grey Mare has never been available at public auction.

Guy Schwinge, of the auction house Duke's in Dorchester, Dorset, which is holding the sale on 10 April, said: "It was a breathtaking find to discover these paintings that were stacked against the wall of a house.

"To find just one of these works would have been incredible – but to find three was quite exceptional."

The Picasso work shows the artist and his lover, Louise Lenoir, known as Odette, Picasso's first girlfriend in Paris.

It is believed to have been painted in 1901 or 1902, when the Spanish master was a struggling artist in his early twenties.