Lady With Book Puzzle 
by Guest Writer Roberta Shore

We invite you to read Roberta Shore's review on the following jigsaw puzzle. Since she has discovered the advantages of jigsaw puzzling, she has reviewed/journaled several that will be available on this website. 

Picasso’s Woman With A Book Amazon link
Picasso’s Woman With A Book Piatnik Ribbon Cut 1000 Pieces Finished Dimensions: 26.7” x 18.8”

My Newbie Difficulty Rating; hard

Roberta-Profile
Picasso’s Woman With A Book Piatnik Ribbon Cut 1000 Pieces Finished Dimensions: 26.7” x 18.8”

Picasso’s Woman With A Book 

Piatnik
Ribbon Cut
1000 Pieces

Finished Dimensions: 26.7” x 18.8”

* indicates see end note

My favorite puzzle style is large areas of similar color, so I thought this fine art puzzle would be fairly easy. Um, not so much. It definitely required more time and concentration than I anticipated. Some quality issues, a lot of textures, and all the black and near black brown certainly added to the difficulty. But it still was fun to watch this painting come together. And it could have been even more so if not for . . .

Quality: . . . false fits and loose piece fit. The former is frustrating, the later totally annoying. Everything else was okay. The full illustration was on the top of the sturdy but overly large box. Inside was a sealed plastic bag of the pieces; no poster was included. Color match box picture to pieces was very good. There was quite a bit of puzzle dust. The solid pieces have low sheen. A few of the pieces were together uncut just at a corner, but none were damaged and none were missing.

Getting started: Find the edge pieces and sort by color. I did a lot of sorting by color. I also sorted out areas such as the yellow frame and contents, the squiggly yellow line, white and purple section, the blue and black print, the orange and the blue striped areas, etc. Sorting out the two shades of dark blue was hard enough; sorting out the dark brown from the black, was in two words, really difficult.

Construction: Oh boy, that took a lot of time! First off, the border. Almost totally black / dark brown with few color hints. I did not build it to get started, partly for fear of false fits, but mostly it wouldn’t have offered much help. I separated out the edge pieces that had any color and connected what I could - there wasn’t much. So I pieced together “Picasso”. One of those pieces has an orange tab; I did some building from there. Then I pieced together the yellow picture frame.* Everything took time, more-so because of possible false fits, but I saw progress, so I just kept going. Having a space to fill, and no piece to fill it is disheartening. After the first section I had to pull apart, rearrange, exchange pieces, and deal with loose piece fit — aarrgghh! — I found it prudent to check any iffy piece with its neighbors.

Still, I missed a couple false fits in the darkest areas. The possibility of another one, or almost worse, a missing piece, stays on your mind, taking a modicum of calm, not to mention fun, out of the puzzling experience. The time rolled on. In “busy” puzzles, even if a piece might fit exactly, it is fairly easy to see the illustration design on it is wrong. With blocks of color, not so much, if at all. Plus here, the chance of false fits was heightened because of the piece cut. With no exaggeration, 99.9 percent of the pieces were the 2 ins / 2 outs variety. Some shapes were 99.9 percent the same as others. Yikes!

Enough about that! I kept smiling, this puzzle was not going to defeat me! Every finished area / color was a victory! Once the scantily dressed woman was comfortably seated in her chair, complete and lost in thought*, I was left with filling in some scattered spaces, those three dark rows before the edge at the bottom, and many edge pieces. I will admit to an overwhelming sense of accomplishment for my persistence when this puzzle was complete!

Final thoughts: This, my second Piatnik puzzle, was tough and still fun - perhaps the ultimate puzzling result. Smiles, accomplishment, and an art lesson*, in total it was an interesting experience. I give this Quality B+, Fun Factor A-

Bon Ton Magazine Cover 1908

This was my first - Bon Ton Magazine Cover 1908. The illustration immediately caught my attention. Yes, it had my favorite feature, large areas of similar color. And yes, other similar things, piece cut, the solid border, and false fits in the properly attired lady’s background. And yes, tough in time and patience, but still fun. This company has a comparatively small collection of puzzles, but a good variety of themes. All of their offerings are 1000 pieces. I can recommend the brand despite the quality issues. The two I’ve done were worth my time and effort. If your taste runs to the “busy” side of puzzles, they have many of those as well.

End note: At first glance I didn’t see it, but then I saw a face in that yellow frame. Hmm, is that a mirror? The woman has put down her book; what is she thinking about? Is she sharing confidences with a visitor? So I did a little research and found this from a notable source. From the Norton Simon Museum - “Among Picasso’s most celebrated likenesses of his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter, Woman with a Book balances sensuality and restraint, enclosing exuberant, thickly applied color in a network of sinuous black lines.

The composition pays homage to the Neoclassical master of line, Jean-Auguste- Dominique Ingres, whose work Picasso had admired since his youth, and whose Portrait of Madame Moitessier the Spanish painter had first encountered in 1921. Resting his model’s head on her hand, and replacing Madame Moitessier’s fan with the fluttering pages of a book, Picasso tapped into the eroticism latent beneath Ingres’s image of bourgeois respectability. The serene profile reflected in a mirror at right in Picasso’s portrait likewise references its Neoclassical precedent but may also constitute an abstract self-portrait.”

There's More To Jigsaw Puzzles Than Pieces Book by Linda Richard. A compilation of 50+ jigsaw puzzle related topics, tips and tricks written in conversational format for easy, light reading.There's More To Jigsaw Puzzles Than Pieces Book by Linda Richard. A compilation of 50+ jigsaw puzzle related topics, tips and tricks written in conversational format for easy, light reading. Click Here
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