Pablo Picasso's Jacqueline au Chevalet (1956) belongs to his revolutionary Madoura ceramics period, the two-decade span in Vallauris during which he produced more than 3,500 ceramic works, transforming a traditional craft into a major form of modern art. The plate depicts Jacqueline Roque, who would soon become Picasso's wife and remained his most important subject and companion through the final decades of his life. 

Rendered on a round, partly glazed ceramic charger measuring 16 3/4 x 16 3/4 inches, the composition unfolds across a smoky gray-brown ground framed by a mottled turquoise-and-white rim. Picasso incises Jacqueline's profile in bold white line — a single dark eye, an arched brow, and a black triangular scarf sweeping downward like a raven's wing — beside an easel holding a canvas marked with a spare, starburst motif.

Produced at Madoura Pottery, the Vallauris workshop run by Georges and Suzanne Ramié, whose expertise gave Picasso the freedom to experiment across clay and glaze, the plate is stamped verso "Madoura Plein Feu" and "Empreinte Originale de Picasso" and inscribed "C119," numbered 40 from an edition of 200. It stands among the defining works of Picasso's postwar reinvention, when Vallauris offered a Mediterranean escape and ceramics became, in his hands, a fully modern art form.