Juan Gris (1887-1927)
Autograph letter signed (‘Pepe’) to an unknown friend (?‘Tana’), Madrid, 19 July 1901
In Spanish. Four pages, 267 x 203mm, bifolium, with marginal ink drawings throughout. Provenance: Sotheby's, 12 & 13 May 1981, lot 15.

Illustrated letter by the fourteen-year-old Gris, throwing light on his boyhood in Madrid. Gris, aged fourteen, writes to an unknown friend in an apparently ongoing correspondence updating each other on daily life. In this instance, there is ‘nothing I want to say, nothing in particular’. He struggles for topics: for example, he humorously updates his correspondent on the purchase of ‘something important, something very important’, which turns out only to be a botijo or water jar. His illustrations show a skyline, a perspectival view down a street, two anthropomorphic buildings, Gris himself writing at a table, Gris again eating while reading a letter, and several other figures.