The work was painted at the new studio that he took on the top floor of the dilapidated building at 13 rue Ravignan, which the poet Max Jacob termed "Le Bateau-Lavoir".

[1] Young Girl with a Flower Basket was created in the autumn of 1905 after Picasso returned to Paris from spending six weeks painting in the countryside in Holland.

The experience of his Dutch trip was also coupled with a renewed Parisian interest in classical art, which had a great influence on Picasso's work during that year.

The acquisitions by the Steins were to mark the beginnings of Picasso's commercial success, and by the end of 1906, his works were being bought by the influential art dealer Ambroise Vollard.

She is depicted naked, save for pink ribbons in her dark hair and a necklace, and she is holding a basket of red flowers, all painted with simplified lines and flattened blocks of colour.

Picasso's classical rendering of "Linda" was designed to convey an aura of purity that contrasts starkly with the harsh reality of her existence.

An earlier pen and ink sketch suggests Picasso originally planned to paint the girl in a white dress, as if attending her first communion, with the red flowers symbolising the blood of the Eucharist.

[6] The art historian John Richardson described the subject as a "sultry looking gamin", while the painting's former owner, Gertrude Stein complained that the girl has "feet like a monkey".

In this masterpiece, Picasso reveals his singular brilliance in a timeless, mesmerising goddess gazing on the universe.Picasso sold the painting to the Galerie du Vingtième Siècle run by art dealer Clovis Sagot near the gallery of Ambroise Vollard.

The Stein siblings had been living in Paris since 1903 and began collecting contemporary artworks in 1904, buying works by Cézanne, Gauguin and Renoir from Ambroise Vollard.

Sagot sold Picasso's Famille d'acrobates avec singe (1905) to Leo Stein, and the couple later acquired Fillette à la corbeille fleurie.