Picasso executed close to sixty pictures of weeping women between January and November 1937. Many of them served a preparatory drawings for his monumental antiwar mural, Guernica (Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid), although, surprisingly, there are no individual weeping women in the final version of the painting. Even after the completion of Guernica, Picasso continued to explore the theme in several paintings, drawings, and etchings. He depicts this sorrowful woman in a Spanish mantilla standing before a wall. He used a took known as a scraper to create the many marks on her tormented face and to emphasize the gashlike tears streaming from her eyes.

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