The result should have satisfied the anonymous vendor for it sold comfortably within the estimates of £1.2 million to £1.8 million.
But seemingly little known locally, it appears to be another loss of moveable heritage from the big splurge of buying of important overseas art conducted by Australians in and around 1972.
The vendor is stated in the catalogue of the sale to have acquired it at that date. It came with the provenance of London's Waddington Gallery.
In the early 1970s Sydney's Villiers Gallery had an exhibition of the portraits by Frank Auerbach at $4000 each before he was discovered by the critics to become the towering figure in British art he is today.
The proprietor of the gallery, George Vago had a lot of dealings with Waddingtons, and with Tooth which was another major London gallery of the day. He mainly confined himself to modern British art.
Other Sydney gallerists were showing British and French Impressionists after secretly subscribing to the notion, widely espoused by Robert Hughes, Time Magazine's Australian-born art critic at the time, that the art of Australia was over-priced.
Local galleries such as Gallery A began showing young American artists to prove overseas art was attractively priced, especially after Blue Poles by Jackson Pollock was sold the following year to the National Gallery of Australia - not that the price, now a bargain, looked like such at the time.
Many of the works sold here at the time have been returned overseas for sale since.
Australia has few other Picassos (either Pablo or children of that name) of note either early or late, so it is sad to know that one was here for so long and was hardly ever seen outside its private home and has now gone.
It was shown in the exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW, Picasso: The Last Decades, 2002-03, no. 13, and illustrated in colour in the catalogue but the local connection was not picked up.
This sadness is further enhanced by its loss so soon after the sale of a painting given to the University of Sydney, Picasso's Jeune fille endormie a portrait of his lover Marie Therese Walter which was sold in London in 2011 for $21 million through Christie's. That was a 1935 work which had not been seen in public since 1941.
Buste de femme (Bust of woman) is a portrait of Jacqueline Roque, said to be the artist's principal model and muse for the last decade of his life.
The Sotheby's announcement of the sale displays no disappointment at sending important art works over for sale – that is after all what auction houses do – but satisfaction with obtaining an international price for it, which is not always the case for works sent overseas through other channels.
For all that, Picasso was a laughing joke in hide-bound conservative Australia in 1959, but Australia had a special relationship with the maestro.
Artist, collector and psychiatrist Oscar Edwards called on him and obtained some small works in the 1970s.
Australia once also held the record price for the purchase of a Picasso, one of his greatest, from the Rose period, La Belle Hollandaise (The pretty Dutch girl). Sent by Harold Rubin for sale to Sotheby's in May 1959 La Belle Hollandaise made £55,000 it was purchased from the sale by the Queensland Art Gallery after Rubin, presumably for tax reasons, had committed them the funds..
Gray's-On-Line currently has an Internet sale of 60 works by him, mainly commercial seeming lithographs of what the wiley old fox happily signed and produced as time went by.
So has Australia's enthusiasm for major modern masters come to this after 53 years?
Australian dealers and auction houses began supplementing their catalogues with overseas art in 1959.
A drawing, Flowers, from O'Hara Gallery , London, was greeted as the first Picasso to go to auction in Australia when it was offered that year by Geoff K Gray the predecessor business after whom the online auction house was named.
During the Impressionist day sale on February 11 Sotheby's also sold for an Australian vendor an Yves Klein object of resin and plaste called L'Esclave Mourant (The Dying slave) Apres Michel Ange (after Michelangelo) for £45,000 against estimates of £25,000 to £35,000.
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