Vertumne Poursuit Pomone de son Amour is an etching executed by Pablo Picasso in 1930, drawing on the Roman mythological tradition of Vertumnus and Pomona — the god of seasons and transformation who pursues the orchard goddess Pomona, ultimately winning her love by disguising himself in a series of different forms before revealing himself in his true nature. The subject comes principally from Ovid's Metamorphoses, the inexhaustible classical source to which Picasso returned throughout his career and which supplied the mythological framework for much of his work of the late 1920s and 1930s.

The etching belongs to the period of Picasso's most intense engagement with classical antiquity as a pictorial language — the years immediately surrounding the Vollard Suite, the monumental series of 100 prints commissioned by the dealer Ambroise Vollard between 1930 and 1937, in which sculptors, models, minotaurs and mythological figures populate a Mediterranean world of timeless sensuality and psychological complexity. While Vertumne Poursuit Pomone de son Amour predates the formal commission, it shares the Vollard Suite's characteristic idiom: two full-length figures rendered in pure contour line, without shading or tonal variation, the forms described with a fluency that draws equally on Greek vase painting, Roman relief sculpture and the neoclassical tradition of Ingres.

Vertumne Poursuit Pomone de son Amour stages the two figures in close proximity, Vertumnus reaching toward Pomona as she turns partly away — a moment of pursuit and hesitation captured in a single continuous line of extraordinary suppleness. Pomona carries a bunch of fruit at her side, her attribute as goddess of orchards and cultivated plants, while Vertumnus is rendered as a vigorous male nude, his posture conveying both desire and restraint. The plainness of the white ground throws the line into complete relief, demanding that it carry the full expressive and narrative weight of the image — a demand that Picasso's etched line meets with characteristic assurance.

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