Picasso first met the then 21-year-old and strikingly beautiful Françoise Gilot in 1943. The two began a flirtation which, after Picasso finally ended his relationship with Dora Maar in 1945, developed into a relationship. In 1946, the year in which the magnificent lithograph (Bloch 401, Mourlot 45) depicting Françoise was created, she moved in with Picasso. The German occupation had ended, and it is possible that Françoise came to embody for Picasso a sense of a new beginning, a feeling that was very much in the air in post-war France.

It was during this period that Picasso became increasingly interested in lithography as a means of artistic expression. From the early 20th century through the 1930s and 1940s, drypoint and etching had dominated his printmaking, with only a small number of lithographs produced during these decades. Many of the artist’s best-known and most important lithographs were created during the second half of the 1940s and throughout the 1950s.