SIR, I read with interest the article ‘Picasso’s “Acadmic study of a cast of a classical sculpture” (1893–94) and the sight-size technique’ by Joan Uraneck in your issue of December 2008 (pp.826–28).  I would like to point out that copying to scale in the flat does  not constitute sight-size; if it did then all such copies would be sight-size, which is patently not the case. Sight-size is primarily a portrait practice, the fundamental principle being that the artist stands back not only to see the sitter and image together but  to judge the ‘big effect’ of the work as a whole. There is no  evidence (and none is cited in the article) that Picasso ever used or was aware of sight-size as a technique.

I should also like to draw attention to the fact that all the references used in the article’s second paragraph are taken from my essay ‘Sight-size, an Historical Overview’, which was presented to Joan Uraneck when she visited Florence last year. It has been available on the internet for some time and was published in a monograph, Urban Larsson Painting 1991–2006 (Zwolle 2006). My book Sight-size Portraiture will be published later this year.