A 1932 Pablo Picasso masterpiece has sold for $139 million, the second highest price ever achieved for the artist, according to Sotheby's, Report informs referring to BBC.

Femme a la Montre (Woman with a Watch) also becomes the most valuable work sold at auction this year.

It depicts Marie-Therese Walter, the French model who was also a lover of the Spanish artist, and the subject of many of his paintings.

The work had been valued at $120 million before it went to auction.

It was previously owned by the late art collector Emily Fisher Landau, who bought it in 1968, and has been purchased by an anonymous buyer.

Femme a la Montre is a portrait of Walter seated in a throne-like chair against a blue background.

Known as Picasso's "golden muse", Walter was 17 when she met the 45-year-old Picasso in Paris, and the pair later entered into a secret relationship while he was still married to Olga Khokhlova, a Ukrainian ballerina.

Walter became the subject for many of Picasso's paintings, including the 1932 work Femme Nue Couchee (Nude Reclining Woman), which sold for $67.5 million at auction in 2022.

Picasso's most expensive painting to sell at auction was Les Femmes d'Alger (Women of Algiers), which fetched $179.3 million at Christie's in 2015.