We see Picasso’s submissive self depicted in a particularly dark light in Actor and Child (1905), which depicts a young boy in a blue leotard—the same color as the boy’s smock in Boy with a Pipe—who, though discernibly male, yet retains the sexually ambiguous marks of a child; his folded hands symbolically conceal his genitalia. Yet his facial expression is almost identical to Jacob’s. The actor has the boy by both shoulders, preparing to lead him somewhere; his darkened-out eyes suggest a dark intent. The boy appears reluctant. Here, Picasso provides us with what seems an at least potentially sexual and disturbing narrative, fraught with homoerotic tension. The helpless resignation of the boy, contrasted with the blind assertiveness of the older male actor, represents Picasso’s competing sexual selves. Indeed, Werner Spies notes in his Picasso’s World of Children, that in many of his later works, the artist depicts himself as a “blind beast” led by a woman (Spies). So, too, after his affair with Max Jacob, Picasso would spend his life ‘led’ by numerous women and would paint them voraciously. In Actor and Child, the blind actor plays the role of Picasso’s artistically virile beast-self and the young boy, in the same facial language as the sketch of Jacob, represents Picasso’s homosexual self, emotional and artistically self-imitative. One might even suggest that the sort of ‘self-imitative’ emotional import that characterizes Picasso’s works from his time with Jacob, is here suggested by the boy’s introverted posture. Clearly this blue ‘self’ appears already destined to be subsumed by its larger and more forceful antagonist, the actor in rose.