This work is part of only 5 proofs before the steel-facing of the plate, for a more nuanced rendering of tonalities, as Picasso prefered. Printed before the final edition of 50, this work has as a provenance the collection of Marina Picasso.

Portrait-charge d'un personnage en larmes is part of a series of etchings produced between March 16 and October 5, 1968. This series, the largest in the artist's corpus of etchings, was shown in December at Galerie Louise Leiris, then at the Art Institute of Chicago. The title of the exhibition, "Trois cent quarante-sept gravures" ("Three hundred and forty-seven etchings"), gave its name to the corpus, which is also known simply as "les 347" ("the 347"). Isolated in the calm of Mougins, the painter, already 86, concentrated on this project, working at a steady pace to the point of paroxysm. His imagination took flight in a series in which all the themes dear to Picasso were present: the circus, women, the painter and his model. Always mindful of art history, where he is already aware of having become a canonical artist, references to Rembrandt, with whom he rivals in engraving, El Greco, Goya and Velazquez, as well as Ingres and Manet, are present. The 347 give a vision of an existence devoted to desire and sensual pleasure. In his plates, acrobats cross paths with bourgeois and aristocrats in brothels or the circus, in the artist's studio, a world where eroticism is omnipresent.

It was at this time that Picasso began to rework the works of his Old Masters. Portrait-charge d'un personnage en larmes sees Picasso return to one of his earliest references: El Greco. But, unlike the slender, atrophied bodies of the Suite des Saltimbanques more than 60 years earlier, this time the reference is comic: Picasso was amused by the pesonnage lifting his eyes to Heaven, which seemed to him to linger under the Virgin's skirt.