At the start of his career Picasso, like most young artists, was in search of a style of his own. His earliest exhibited works had been executed in on academic style reminiscent of many of the salon painters of the mid- to late-nineteenth century. After his first trip to Paris in I 900, however, Picasso experimented with a number of new painterly vocabularies derived from some of the key artists of the day, Picasso was particularly interested in the representation of social outcasts, and for this, he looked to the works of Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. He also admired the stylistic innovations of these painters, whose use of heightened colors and frequently exaggerated forms adopted a more expressive, individualistic approach to painting, largely derived from late nineteenth-century French Symbolism.

In Waiting (Margot), Picasso draws upon the work of a number of contemporary artists. In addition to the three mentioned above, he is also showing on awareness of the claustrophobic spaces and loose handling of the Nabi painters, including Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940) and Pierre Bonnard (1867-1 947),