40 Dessins de Picasso en Marge du Buffon (40 Drawings by Picasso in the Margins of Buffon)

In 1936 Ambroise Vollard commissioned illustrations by Picasso for the comte de Buffon’s eighteenth-century encyclopedia, Histoire naturelle. The book, with Picasso’s thirty-one prints of animals, was published in 1942. A year later, Picasso brought his lover, the Surrealist photographer and painter Dora Maar, a copy of the Histoire naturelle that he had dedicated to her. While at her studio, he decorated the margins and blank pages with human heads, animals, and fantastical creatures, with Maar herself as a bird-woman sphinx on the title page, shown here. The dedication, “per Dora Maar / tan rébufona!” (for Dora Maar, so pretty!), is a pun on the name Buffon and the Catalan word for “pretty,” bufó.