Une Maja Posant sur un Piédestal is a sugarlift aquatint and etching from La Celestine - one of the most significant illustrated books of Picasso's late career and a landmark in the history of the livre d'artiste. Published in 1968 by Editions Crommelynck, Paris, the suite comprises sixty-six original prints illustrating Fernando de Rojas' La Celestina, the Spanish tragicomedy first published in 1499 and considered one of the foundational texts of Western literature. That Picasso chose this work - written in Spanish, rooted in the culture of his birth - is itself significant: it represents a late return to his Spanish inheritance, undertaken at the age of eighty-six with undiminished creative force.

The work belongs to two interconnected bodies of work: the sixty-six print La Celestine suite, and the broader Suite 347 - Picasso's monumental sequence of 347 etchings created in a single extraordinary campaign between March and October 1968, widely regarded as one of the supreme achievements in the history of printmaking.

The maja - a term rooted in Spanish culture referring to a woman of the people, self-possessed and elegantly provocative - had been a defining subject in Spanish art since Goya's celebrated paintings of the early nineteenth century. Picasso's engagement with the maja tradition here is both a homage to that lineage and a characteristically subversive reworking of it: the figure on her pedestal is rendered with the economy of the sugarlift process, which produces velvety, painterly marks quite unlike the precise incised line of conventional etching. The result is a work of exceptional tonal richness, in which Picasso's fluid draughtsmanship is translated into the intaglio medium with complete authority.

The suite was printed and published by Aldo and Piero Crommelynck at their Paris atelier - the master printers with whom Picasso collaborated closely throughout his final decade, and who brought to his late graphic work a technical refinement that places these prints among the finest of his career. The paper - Richard-de-Bas laid paper with the La Celestine watermark - was specially commissioned for the edition, underscoring the exceptional care taken in the production of the suite as a whole.

This impression is designated Épreuve d'artiste - an Artist's Proof - and is signed in pencil by Picasso, placing it outside the regular numbered edition of 400. As one of a small number of proofs retained by the artist and atelier, it represents the most desirable category of impression from this suite.

Une Maja Posant sur un Piédestal is catalogued as Bloch 1598 and Cramer 149.