Picasso made a number of linocuts in the early 1950s, as posters for exhibitions and bullfights, but this is his first independent colour-linocut image. It was based on a postcard sent to him by his dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler of a painting by Lucas Cranach the Younger, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Adopting the conventional technique for colour linocuts, Picasso cut a different lino block for each different colour in the print. Here there are five colours (yellow, red, brown, blue and black), so five separate blocks had to be cut. Registering each block correctly was difficult, hence the slight overlaps and gaps between the colours. It was printed in an edition of fifty, plus a few Artist’s Proofs: this is one of those ‘AP’ copies.