Buste de Femme d'après Cranach le Jeune is a colour linocut executed by Pablo Picasso in 1958, printed on Arches paper and signed and numbered in pencil. The work is one of Picasso's most celebrated and technically ambitious early linocuts, produced at Vallauris in collaboration with master printer Hidalgo Arnéra and widely regarded as a landmark in the development of the colour linocut series that would reach its fullest expression in the early 1960s.

The source image is a portrait by Lucas Cranach the Younger, the sixteenth-century German painter whose elaborately costumed aristocratic sitters — laden with jewellery, encased in richly patterned fabrics, wearing the distinctive flat bonnets and layered ruffs of the Saxon court — provided Picasso with a subject ideally suited to the decorative and chromatic possibilities of the linocut medium. Picasso had long maintained a practice of working directly after Old Master sources, approaching paintings by Velázquez, Delacroix, Manet and others not as exercises in reproduction but as opportunities for radical pictorial reinvention — using the source as a structural armature while subjecting it to the full force of his own approach to the image. Buste de Femme d'après Cranach le Jeune belongs firmly in this tradition.

The outcome is an image of extraordinary chromatic richness and surface complexity. The figure's costume — the layered necklaces, the patterned bodice, the striped sleeves, the white ruff fanning outward at the shoulder — is rendered in a compressed, almost mosaic-like field of black, yellow, teal, red and white, each colour block locked against the others with the precision demanded by the reductive linocut process. The face, by contrast, is handled with relative simplicity — the Cubist displacement of the features reading clearly against the decorative profusion of the costume. Against the deep black of the background and the acid yellow of the upper left, the figure blazes with an intensity that transforms Cranach's stately northern court portrait into something altogether more visceral and immediate

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