Amours de Jupiter et de Sémélé is one of thirty etchings Picasso created in 1930 to illustrate Ovid's Metamorphoses - a commission that stands as one of the defining collaborations in the history of the livre d'artiste and the work that launched the career of Albert Skira as one of the twentieth century's most significant art publishers.

The commission came about through one of the more charming episodes in Picasso's biography. Skira, then a young and ambitious Swiss publisher with little track record, persuaded Picasso through his mother's gentle but persistent lobbying on a beach at Juan-les-Pins. Picasso, who famously hated to disappoint, eventually suggested "a classical author - perhaps something mythological." Skira found Ovid, and the result was one of the most celebrated illustrated books of the century.

The subject - the love of Jupiter and Semele - is among the most dramatic in all of Ovid: Semele, pregnant with the future Dionysus, is tricked by Juno into demanding that Jupiter reveal himself in his full divine glory. Overwhelmed by the vision of the god, she is consumed by his lightning and fire. Picasso's treatment of the subject is characteristically contrary: rather than the thunderous climax of the myth, he renders the lovers in a moment of tender, classical intimacy - his signature economy of line distilling the entire sensual vocabulary of antiquity into a composition of extraordinary purity and restraint.

This impression belongs to the suite of 100 printed from the cancelled plates with remarques - a distinct and separately documented category within the publication history of Les Métamorphoses. The remarques, visible as additional small etched figure studies in the lower margin below the main composition, were added to the plates at the point of cancellation to prevent further unauthorised printing. The cancellation date - 17 Mars 1933 - is inscribed in the plate lower right, distinguishing these impressions clearly from the main edition of 145 published in 1931. Printed on Rives wove paper and issued unsigned, these cancelled plate impressions are among the rarest and most documentarily significant impressions of the suite.

Separate impressions are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston - placing this work among the most institutionally significant etchings in Picasso's entire graphic output.

Amours de Jupiter et de Sémélé is catalogued as Bloch 104; Baer/Geiser 148; Cramer 19.